The author is a sociologist of international relations. She wrote the book lose the south (Éditions Écosociété, 2020) and edited the collective work Feminist Perspectives in International Relations (PUM, 2022).
Thursday, June 22, the passengers of the submarine Titanthese tourists left to observe the wreckage of the titanic 4000 kilometers below the surface of the Atlantic, were declared dead. The submarine would have imploded due to the materials composing it. The remains of the metal coffin were found about 685 kilometers from the Canadian coast. The eyes of the whole world were fixed on the titanic rescue operation to save this handful of people, the boss of the tourist company, a British billionaire, a scientist specializing in titanic, a businessman and his son. The Canadian and US coast guards, air support, private teams with state-of-the-art equipment: nothing has been spared.
With updates daily if not several times a day, the readership of the international media remained hopeful until midday last Thursday, since there was in principle oxygen until then. However, the US Navy had already established the probability of an implosion on June 18, when contact with the mainland was broken.
On June 14, a fishing boat with up to 750 passengers sank in the Ionian Sea, a segment of the Mediterranean Sea off the western coast of the Peloponnese. The sinking, crushing all but a hundred lives on board, took place about 50 kilometers southwest of the Greek town of Pilos. Fifty kilometers. The distance between Dollard-des-Ormeaux and Pointe-aux-Trembles. The Greek and European coast guards would have observed the overloaded boat a few hours before the sinking and would have taken the decision not to rescue its passengers.
Both tragedies are tragedies for the families left behind. But those with no family ties to the victims paid much more attention to the first than to the second.
Are we more interested in the ultra-rich than in migrants?
My journalism teachers taught me how to determine what news is newsworthy. There ” newsworthiness is triangulated according to the number of deaths, the sensational character of a story and the distance between it and the target audience. The first factor is self-explanatory: the death of 50 people in the Philippines is less likely to end up on the front page than that of 1,000 people in Mexico. The sensational nature of an event dictates that the death of a man trying to save children trapped in a mine in Thailand will be more publicized than a man who dies in a car accident in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu.
The third factor is more complex, since the distance between an event and an audience is more than geographic. A car accident in Alma will of course be more likely to end up in Newscast of Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean than that of Sherbrooke. But the distance is often subjective: an individual with whom we identify more will arouse our pity more. Fifty deaths in France will affect Montrealers more than the same number in Saudi Arabia. The fire at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris in 2019 caused more ink to flow here than the destruction of the mausoleums of Timbuktu in Mali in 2016.
I often use this evaluation of the ” newsworthiness to discuss the hierarchy between Western lives and non-Western lives. In particular, between 1972 and 1985, a US researcher quantified the extent of US media coverage between 35 natural disasters that claimed the lives of more than 300 people. Beyond the severity of the incident, the so-called “cultural” proximity was the most determining factor. In 1976, an earthquake in Guatemala that killed 4,000 people received only a third of the coverage of an earthquake in Italy that killed 1,000.
The difference between the Titan and migrants from the Ionian Sea, however, is neither racial nor following the Global North and South divide. Two out of five people in the submarine were Pakistani, as were almost half of the people on board the boat that ran aground on June 14. The small Pakistani town of Bandli alone would mourn at least 24 of the castaways. The rescue of dozens of people without life jackets grabbing pieces of wood to keep from sinking is a sarcastically reminiscent of Rose letting go of Jack’s hand. And what about the fact that the Titan went to the wreckage of the titanic which, in sinking, privileged the lives of those in first class over those of the poor in the hold.
Beyond the surprising character of the epic of the ironically named submarine, the greater interest in the Titan stems at least in part from the fact that the public has identified more with a handful of people so rich they can pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a trip to 20,000 leagues under the sea than with people fleeing the war or poverty. THE New York Times painted a very sensitive portrait of the 48-year-old Pakistani entrepreneur and his son, but none of the Bandli villagers who died off the coast of Greece. I blame myself for knowing the names, the aspirations, the stories of some, but for ignoring everything about the others.
The implosion of Titan is certainly more “sensational” than the sinking of (another) boat in the Mediterranean. For what ? Because this type of event has become too common. It hurts me to write it, but it’s the reality. European policies and global inequalities have transformed the stretch of water between North Africa and Europe into a gigantic marine cemetery. According to estimates, more than 25,000 people have lost their lives in the Mediterranean since 2014. These figures are so absurd that they have become statistics. Cold numbers.
The ranking of tragedies is understandable, in a world where dozens of events occur every day. It would be overwhelming to mourn every death in the world. Such empathy would be debilitating. But the stories we tell, the lines we publish and those we read make some tragedies about statistics and others about human lives.