The Guardian view on danger at sea: The contrast between the frantic hunt for a missing submersible and the failure to save migrants drowning in the Mediterranean is illuminating
A massive operation is under way to find and save a stricken vessel and its passengers. As time passes, anxious families and friends wait with growing fear. The US coastguard, Canadian armed forces and commercial vessels are all hunting for the Titan submersible, which has gone missing with five aboard on a dive to the wreck of the Titanic in the north Atlantic. The UK’s Ministry of Defence is also monitoring the situation.
It is hard to think of a starker contrast with the response to a fishing boat which sank in the Mediterranean last week with an estimated 750 people, including children, packed onboard. Only about 100 survived, making this one of the deadliest disasters in the Mediterranean. Greece and the EU blame people smugglers, who overcrowd boats and abuse those aboard them. But both have profound questions to answer about their own role in such disasters. Activists say authorities were repeatedly warned of the danger this boat faced, hours before it went down, but failed to act.
while I certainly think the affluency of the victims is a factor it would be disingenuous to claim this is ALL it is.
For any regular occurrence, at some point apathy sets in. Car accidents are just not interesting to report after the hundreth time. If there were a dozen lost subs near the Titanic every year, I'm sure the story would lose it's luster too.
There's also the aspect that refugees are an ongoing and much more complex issue. You can't just save one ship of refugees. There will be another one in short order. And if you do save them all the question is what do you do with them? At the very least that'll cost you money. At worst it'll cost you political power. Are you going to realize what these people have gone through to get them to a point where they are willingly face these risks? Realizing that maybe something should be done about that is even costlier. And depending on the political landscape in your country most will just consider this "a self solving problem" anyway.
This is not to excuse what we're seeing. But we can't pretend that the stories should be covered the same. They aren't the same. One is much easier to cover than the other.
I see your point but just for the sake of discussion, try and change "refugees" with "people".
You should notice how all the other considerations simply are not worth the electricity used to transmit them on your screen.
I mean, in an ideal world that emotive argument would work. But this isn't an ideal world and that ignores all the additional baggage that comes with a country taking in these refugees/migrants loel housing, basic needs funding, healthcare, etc. This is on top of lots of European nations already suffering economically at the moment from the Covid fallout and the Ukraine situation. Just saying "we should save them as it's the right thing to do" is far to simple for the world we live in.
I agree with that. As I already said, what I wrote was not supposed to be an excuse but an explanation.