A Tale of Two Boats
Mainstream Media Fixated on the Titanic Sub While Coverage of Drowned Migrants Rapidly Sunk
Global events this past week made for surreal theatre. Two vessels navigating the same earth’s blue seas, taken to sea by motives worlds apart.
On June 14th, a boat overloaded with refugees sunk before it reached land in Greece. It carried over seven-hundred passengers, all refugees pushed from countries marred by poverty and war, cruel dictatorships, and even crueler futures at home. They were overwhelmingly Pakistani, Palestinian, Syrian, and Egyptian souls who set sail into the black unknown.
They prayed for better lives in Europe. But all but 104 of the 750 refugees plunged into the depths of Mediterranean, death, or the blue vortex of vanishment in between.
News coverage in Europe flooded the screens in the hours after the calamity, but quickly waned back into silence shortly after. Media attention of the sunken refugee boat was only passing on mainstream media outlets in the United States. The identity of its lost, found, and dead passengers – brown, poor, and predominantly Muslim – did not register.
Unless the headline leads with “Muslim Ban,” the status of poor Muslim refugees is at best of secondary interest in America, and even more commonly, ignored.
Four days after the refugee vessel sunk into the Mediterranean, the Titanic submersible plunged deep into the Atlantic Ocean. Occupied by five billionaires, who paid a king’s ransom of $250,000 to board the small vessel intending to sink deep into the ocean.
Unlike the disastrous fate of the vessel overloaded with refugees, the submersible’s design was to plunge deep into the Atlantic to observe its namesake, the famous Titanic ship that crashed onto the ocean floor and into human memory 111 years ago.
This was extravagant voyeurism. The kind only available to the highest echelon of the 1%. The very element sitting within the submersible, whose collective ticket fares dwarfed the aggregate net worth of the 750 passengers atop the refugee boat.
This was the have everythings on the opposite side of the have nots. The former possessing titanic sums of money that could alter the life course of every refugee atop that sunken vessel. Billionaires who charted a course of unimaginable opulence, while the empty stomachs of the refugees wished for reality that kept them far from sea.
A tale of two boats. Well, not boats, but water vessels. Occupied by dramatically different passengers, who were moved to the ocean by entirely distinct motives. The excess of wealth navigating the decision of the five billionaires in search of old ghosts in the Atlantic, and the nihilism of desperation pushing the hundreds of poor souls into the hostile blues of the Mediterranean.
A tale of two boats. The juxtapositions were striking. But their fate one in the same. The media coverage and the urgency to rescue the victims, however, were oceans apart.
The Titanic submersible dominated the news cycle as word of its disappearance rushed in. American, European, and global news outlets fixated on the curious story of “five billionaires lost at sea,” seduced by the identity of the passengers and the value society assigns to them.
In the meantime, hundreds of refugees were still missing. In fact, more than 500 of the 750 passengers were still unaccounted for. But media coverage faded out, as did efforts to search for nameless faces who yearned for a better life. The tide of new coverage, popular interest, and millions of dollars devoted to rescue the five billionaires was nonstop. And continued, until news of the sub imploding hit the news cycle on Friday.
The five billionaires, sadly, were dead. And the Titanic submersible met the same fate of the iconic boat it set course to observe.
The story stopped with their death. While the story, for the hundreds of refugees drowning between the anonymity of the Mediterranean and the poverty that pushed them into it, was dead while hundreds could still be saved – and kept alive.
The tide of the mainstream media, and its valuation of human life, is as cruel as the ides of March. Let these last days of June, and its tale of two boats, serve as a reminder.
Khaled A. Beydoun is a law professor and author of The New Crusades: Islamophobia and the Global War on Muslims. You can follow his socials at @khaledbeydoun.