You might be right that it’s not an issue of conscious personal vendetta against migrants (although I wouldn’t necessarily count that out) or an explicit class war, but I also don’t think that either of those things are what most people (or at least not the ones who weren’t just obnoxiously meming it for the drama or for hot takes) were trying to point out.

The comparison is meant to make us examine our priorities as a society. Why do we want to talk so much about these 5 rich people in the weird billionaire sub vs the migrant shipwreck? I do think it’s a valid theory that at least part of it is that as a society we place more significance and worth in the wealthy white folks. I think that a lot of it is probably also a ghoulish sort of rubbernecking impulse. The details of the sub story were weird and a bit morbid. Neither of those impulses are great, and I don’t think there’s any harm in pointing out the inequities and inviting some self reflection on where they come from.

However, I don’t love the sort of snide, gleeful celebration of the death of the folks on the sub either. I understand the frustrations that it comes from, but I think the folks cracking jokes or celebrating those deaths ought to be doing as much self reflection as the folks that were ignoring or ignorant of the migrant deaths.

I think you’re missing the primary complaint of people who are unsatisfied with the news coverage.

It’s not that it didn’t make sense, it’s that it was unjust.

The people critical of the coverage found what is frankly a pretty niche and unimpactful story about some exceptionally rich people taking an extraordinary risk and suffering the consequences both ungermane to ourselves personally and to our political landscape in general. And stuff that does matter to ourselves and the political landscape – say, the migrant ship story – gets rescheduled to allow more coverage about joysticks or pressure hulls.

I personally view the entire fiasco as a searing indictment of how we treat our fellow humans and how obsessed we are with wealthy white people deaths.

This is like saying there are no racially discriminatory hiring practices, employers are just hiring the most qualified people (which ignores that it’s harder for disenfranchised people to gain those qualifications). That is to say: people aren’t arguing that this situation doesn’t make sense, they’re arguing that it’s wrong. And it doesn’t stop being wrong just because the people involved had no bad intentions.

Expect to butt heads with more and more people in the coming years if you argue by appealing to the status quo, because an increasing number of people are starting to take issue with the entire system as it stands.

My two cents:

The news outlets are only putting out what their audience wants to see.

I don’t think this is entirely true. Yes they’ll run with stories that get lots of engagement, but news agencies still have, well, agency. They can choose what to focus coverage on, even if it’s not the most lucrative story. They also have lots of room for how they want to cover a story, what angles they want to take.

While I agree that to an extent there’s a relationship from views to money to coverage, saying they’re “only putting out what their audiences want to see” is kinda reductive. They also play an important role in shaping what their audiences want to see. I’d say it’s important to be critical of what we’re being shown and what we’re not, and how different stories get spun.

One point I think we might agree on is that this also means that we should think critically about ourselves and our own reactions to the stories we’re presented with. For example, I know I have a tendency to get interested in these kinds of stories from the perspective of wanting to learn safety lessons for the future (same reason I keep up to date on US CSB reports). At some point, though, it became apparent that there were no (or not many) interesting safety lessons to learn here and I continued following the developments anyway. It’s worthwhile for me to consider why I did that, and taking that time to consider my own reactions here is a part of this same process of thinking critically about the news we’re shown.

Another thing I just wanted to throw in here, on top of what others have already said, is that the news media exists in the same cultural ecosystem as the public, so generally the audience and the media itself will mirror each other’s sensibilities.

The bulk of news media based in the United States is created and consumed by white people. White billionaires and their families - side note: actually two were Pakistani - involved in a tragedy, whether they truly understood the risks/consequences of their actions or not, are inherently more sympathetic figures to many white Americans, than largely non-white migrants and refugees are.

This disparity in sympathy will color how the media covers the different tragedies. Migrant and refugee stories receive a passing mention, a short segment, and maybe a few op-eds mulling over whether western nations should open their doors to migrants and refugees. The average American might even momentarily lament their deaths before turning the TV off or changing the channel or continuing to scroll their social media feed. Eventually, these stories and mainstream discussion of them will be obscured and forgotten.

Meanwhile, some older, ultra-wealthy men, whose submarine implodes on a whimsical expedition to inspect the wreckage of the Titanic, will have (and have had) their tragedy memorialized with feature-length documentaries which pay actors to dramatically recreate the events leading up to their deaths. There will be “60 Minutes” interviews with their family members, deep-sea researchers, physicists, policy-makers, and other experts. The general public will be able to recount, in detail, much of the facts about the case, and there will be all manner of conspiracy theories about it. The media and the public will equally engage in this back-and-forth spectacle over what happened for years after.

I forgot what my point was so this is somewhat of a ramble, but I’m generally on the same page with the other comments.

I understand why it got more coverage. What I am unhappy about is all the ridiculous amount of resources poured into the sub when it was obvious they were dead from the internal info they had, and it’s 5 people who took an absurd risk vs hundreds of migrants.

Couldn’t agree more. Obviously the migrants’ story is an immense tragedy, not only for all the lives lost but also for the bigger picture behind it, all the hardships they endured to even make it onto that ship, smugglers making money off desperate people, questionable actions of the coast guard, the fact that it wasn’t the first time and won’t be the last because we’re too slow to come up with a solution - and it’s all being talked about on the news. At least on the news I watch and read.

People who followed the story of the submarine were hardly interested in the fates of its passengers, it was simply a more exciting spectacle when nobody knew whether they were still alive and might be rescued, with countdowns when the oxygen would run out.

It’s the way human brain works, we are drawn to simple and exciting stories that don’t require extra effort to understand all the background involved.