5 vs. 500: The Difference of Zeros

The zeros that give urgency and the zeros that give nothing

Yamna Asim, Staff Writer

February 15, 2024

Credit: via REUTERS

Last summer, the world was desperately awaiting updates on the status of the missing submersible, the Titan and its five passengers. The scope of media coverage and public attention the Titan got was huge as this was not some ordinary submersible, and its passengers were no ordinary people.

These five passengers aboard the Titan were all wealthy men, two of them even billionaires, who each paid a hefty price of $250, 000 to visit the site of the sunken Titanic ship. The Titan lost connection with the mainland an hour and forty-five minutes into its voyage, and it became a race against time to find the Titan before the oxygen ran out inside the submersible and its passengers asphyxiated to death.

The Titan’s race against time captivated the public to the point where news stations gave hourly updates on its status and had countdowns for when the oxygen would run out. Social media platforms like Tiktok, Twitter and Instagram were also similarly enthralled by this incident and its users were flooded with content related to the Titan and its missing passengers, which eventually resulted in it being a trending topic for days.

The search for the Titan was also wide-scale, involving help from search teams and rescue personnel from the U.S., Canada, France and Britain. The search went on for days, and rescue teams are said to have spent days scanning the incident site with the help of planes and ships. In addition, to rescue efforts, resources were also poured in to figure out what led to the demise of the Titan.

A tragedy at sea is what some were calling this, but the real tragedy was the one that happened two weeks before this incident. A boat carrying 750 migrants seeking sanctuary from their homelands sank near the coast of Greece. It was called one of the worst tragedies in the Mediterranean Sea by many people including the EU Commissioner for Home Affairs, Ylva Johansson and Gianluca Rocco, head of the Greek section of the International Organization for Migration, the U.N. migration agency, yet news coverage surrounding this tragedy was scarce. Though there were some reports by notable news networks like CNN and BBC, it was not enough, especially when compared to the amount of coverage the missing Titan got. 

750 people had sunk, yet two weeks later, there were still no definitive numbers on the death toll. It is said that around 500 people are still missing, now presumed dead, and there was still no significant public reaction. This lack of reaction continued even when the Greek authorities decreased their efforts and resources to recover dead migrants. 

The loss of any life is a tragedy, but these two events put into perspective how the gravity of a tragedy is determined. It is not about the number of lives lost, but more about what lives hold more sensational value for the media.

Media sensation is becoming an increasingly growing power, and we, the people, are its target. Until we collectively abandon the idea of news as a source of entertainment and start viewing it as a tool for reporting about the world, the news will continue to operate with this sensationalizing agenda and keep on classifying tragedies as tragic and worthy of reporting only if they are deemed to have the “exciting” or “shocking” value to them.