When I was younger, I had this illusion that what the news media covered was always important. I assumed that the stories that made their way to the TV screens were the ones that people most needed to hear about. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve slowly come to the realization that our news rarely centers around our planet’s most critical issues. Our attention is fleeting, and the reality is that so often our eyes just shift toward what’s most shocking.
The media frenzy that’s surrounded a missing submersible lost within the Atlantic ocean is a prime example of our disparate focus. The round-the-clock media coverage that’s been given to the rescue efforts appears more like an attempt to capitalize on spectacle than an earnest attempt to inform the public.
The thorough and utterly speculative descriptions of what life in the Titan must have been like had grown gratuitous by the third hour of perpetual broadcast. The somber voices and crocodile tears that accompanied nearly every segment on the matter was just part of the media circus. To consider the sheer amount of attention the issue has been given, it’s easily forgotten that the loss experienced was hardly more consequential than a car crash. These five lost explorers have eaten more of the world’s attention in the past few days than the war ravaging Ukraine has in the last month.
But many have grown tired of hearing about Ukraine; the tale of this vessel lost in the depths of the Atlantic has more intrigue. In fact, it’s already been made into a documentary.
Everything about the story, from the ship boarded and the video game controller used to navigate it, to the site it was intent on exploring, left the story poised to earn a prime time spot on almost every news channel.
It’s not that the 5 people on this submersible likely perishing isn’t tragic, only that it’s ironic how quickly we’ve forgotten about the imperiled lives of Ukrainians that once dominated our news cycles. Equally bizarre is how little focus we’ve given to the exponentially more fatal marine accidents that occurred on the other side of the globe only just last week.
In fact, one of the tragedies I hadn’t even heard about at all until I began researching the other. In one instance, following a wedding In northern Nigeria, over a hundred lost their lives on the Niger river when a boat capsized. In Southern Greece last week, too, as many as 500 are feared to have drowned when an overcrowded fishing boat carrying migrants sank.
And yet, so much of the world’s attention and resources have remained myopically centered on the missing Titanic exploration vessel. It’s a story that just has such an inherent level of intrigue around it that it seems to trump the vast suffering that takes place everyday.
The Titanic is the most famous shipwreck in history. For this submersible to be named Titan, and for the CEO to go on air in a now infamous interview, and claim the ship unsinkable — it was the perfect recipe for a press uproar.
The Titanic’s ability to claim lives a century after it sank to the ocean floor is a testament to the curiosity that still surrounds it. To picture 5 people huddled in the cold darkness of the ocean floor beside the rusting behemoth offers a jumping pad for morose musings.
Perhaps it’s not so shocking that this lone issue should have diverted away so much of our attention from the issues that matter. It’s certainly not the first time that it’s happened.
The story of the notorious failure of the Fyre Festival captivated people due to a similar combination of factors. It was another story of the wealthy facing a comeuppance. And in a time of what’s likely the greatest wealth disparity in global history, posh seaside galas going spectacularly south and billionaires being hunted by orcas are stories that sell. Additionally, the two appear to tell similar tales of Murphy’s law at play. “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.”
Not unlike the Titanic on its maiden voyage, so much of what likely failed the Titan was predicted. From its shoddy controls, to its inadequate equipment to brave such depths, to the repeated warnings from experts that the ship was unsafe, so much of OceanGate’s mission seemed like an exercise in futility. That the company could be unironically named anything with “gate” in the title — after the series of gate-related scandals the world had already witnessed — was only one of many harbingers of things to come.
That it would fail in this way was something many argued was inevitable. And it failed so spectacularly that it rendered all hopes of a timely rescue pointless. If the submersible didn’t implode, it was at such a low depth that, even if found, it was virtually impossible that its occupants would still be alive by the time they returned to surface. And yet, the search effort continued to eat up a disproportionate amount of time, attention and resources.
An NBC article entitled A Tale of Two Disasters: Missing Titanic Sub Captivates the World Days After Deadly Migrant Shipwreck spoke of the inequity in treatment between the two maritime disasters of recent weeks.
“…many human rights advocates are frustrated that the world seems to have already moved on and that the resources and media attention being dedicated to the Titan rescue efforts far outweigh those for the sunken migrant ship,” the article reads. “It’s a horrifying and disgusting contrast,” explained Judith Sunderland in a telephone interview. “The willingness to allow certain people to die while every effort is made to save others… it [offers] a really dark reflection on humanity,” she said.
Even with most experts believing that the passengers of the Titan had already perished at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, and they were fully aware that no rescue equipment could save them even if they were located, the rescue efforts continued on in a bullheaded refusal to face facts.
That the Titan has met a fate similar to world’s most famous shipwreck is growing harder to deny. As we’ve pieced together more details of the crews final moment’s, it’s brought into light just how futile our rescue attempts have been. Days were spent scouring vast swaths of ocean for a crew that more than likely died when they first lost communication last Sunday.
In the face of war and climate change and biodiversity collapse and the ancroachment of artificial intelligence, the missing submersible just stands as a macabre distraction. That’s not to say that the victims of tragedies don’t deserve their mourners, only that tragedy is all around us, and that few would want the last hours of their life to be the focus of so many strangers’ undying attention.