The Cold-Blooded Reality of Disaster Coverage

The complaint came from almost every form of media last week on Twitter, on TikTok, at CNN.com, at Mashable, in the New Republic, Yahoo News, the Guardian and elsewhere. Their beef was that journalists had committed an orgy of coverage over the missing Titan submersible while barely covering the week’s other maritime disaster news — the drowning deaths of about 700 migrants off the coast of Greece.

The disparity was easily discerned. You could barely turn on CNN after the submersible went AWOL without viewing an update or a segment while the migrant disaster came and vanished from the TV screen quickly. How could this be? The Titan disaster’s body count was a rounding error when measured against the toll of the Mediterranean sinking. Was the press — and social media — trying to tell us that a handful of people joyriding to the site of a famous shipwreck were more significant, more newsworthy than hundreds of desperate refugees seeking a better life?

To answer the question as coldly as possible, yes. It is true today and has been true for the past 50,000 yesterdays that news coverage is almost never proportional to the number of lives lost. That’s not a defense, but a fact verifiable by anybody who has the patience to pick through newspaper morgues and cemeteries to do the arithmetic. The reasons might sound heartless. Intuitively, two deaths are twice as shocking as one, so it stands to reason that two deaths would get twice as much coverage. But as we’ll see, all deaths are not created equal in the media.

Location Matters. Death count is only one element of the equation journalists use to portion out time and space to report the news. Proximity of mass deaths to the news organ doing the reporting is key. The sudden death of 15 people in Rhode Island would be banner news around the country, but not in Turkmenistan, where the story might not even rate coverage in that country’s press. The converse is true, as well. Rhode Islanders, unless they’re chubby news hogs, are likely to remain uninformed about a deadly earthquake nine time zones away. The Titan was based in the United States and claimed Americans, making it a “local death.”

A Somebody or a Relative Nobody? Were the deceased famous or notable because of their wealth or influence? Two of the Titan’s dead were billionaires, and none who died off the Greek coast has that sort of money. In a perfectly Rawlsian universe, the press would cover all deaths equally. But a short visit to the obituary pages proves that obituarists don’t give a damn about John Rawls. To qualify for a big city newspaper obituary, you must first be “newsworthy.” Accomplished novelist? You’re in. Britpop drummer? Welcome! Rich? Famous politician? Industrialist? Acclaimed inventor? And so on. Just about the only way for a mere mortal to sneak into the Irish sports pages is to have worked at the newspaper publishing the obituary. If you’ve worked at the Washington Post or the New York Times you can be confident a place has been reserved for you in its pages. If a disaster were to befall a big newspaper or news channel, we’d have to bomb it to stop it from covering itself.

The Novelty Factor. Deaths by accident, like a plane crash, usually receive more coverage than those claimed in a natural disaster like a tornado. The reason, which also seems cold, is that editors and readers respond to novelty. Planes aren’t supposed to crash anymore (and crashes have become a rarity in the United States — we haven’t seen one since 2009), whereas tornados are expected to reap their deadly harvest every year. In the case of the Titan, it wasn’t “supposed” to implode and sink because it had been touring the ocean floor since 2001. If another submersible were to kill, say, 10 people in a couple of months, it would likely get less coverage than the Titan because we would have acclimated ourselves to the dangers of such deep dives. It should shame us to even think about it, but editors and readers have acclimated themselves to the drowning of migrants. In the past decade, an estimated 17,000 migrants have perished or gone missing while trying to boat their way to Europe. Corollary: For the reason of novelty, landslides are deemed more newsworthy than avalanches because they happen less often.

The Adventure Bonus: Did the decedent die while attempting to hike across Antarctica? While piloting an experimental aircraft? While climbing a previously unclimbed mountain or kayaking across the Atlantic? The Titan stimulated editors (and readers) because it took on the garb of an “adventure” when it really was just a $250,000 amusement park ride. Sadly, deaths in search of a better life don’t activate the same interest gland in editors and readers.

Instantaneous or Unfolding? Sudden deaths are always newsworthy, but deadly disasters that sustain themselves and unfold over time will always get more play than mass death by thunderbolt. It often takes tsunamis and hurricanes several days to unfold and this gives news organizations more time to dispatch journalists to the scene to capture the story as it happens. Ship sinkings, being almost instantaneous disasters, are like big car wrecks, offering only a brief burst of death to report before descending from view. A fatal apartment fire is a short-term story. An urban California brush fire that turns deadly can trump it in the press because it takes days to do its damage.

There are other variables to the coverage equation. Did children die or the bedridden? If so, the press will reward the disaster or accident with extra ink because these deaths are considered more unbearable.

As a general rule, the more predictable the disaster, a bus plunge in the Andes, say, the less coverage you can expect. Cold-hearted editors are the proximate cause of what feels like disproportionate coverage, but it’s not the complete explanation. Editors learn by trial and error what people like to read, and ever since the telegraph made local disasters international news, they have calibrated their assignment of news resources to the stories that will yield the greatest number of eyes. You can’t blame reporters for the way they report disaster news anymore than you can blame your mortician for your death.

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The greatest study of disaster reporting, which I’ve cited four or five times in my own work, deserves citation here again. Please read “Death Rampant! Readers Rejoice,” by Alexander Cockburn, which appeared in [More] magazine in December 1973. Send your disaster reflections to [email protected]. No new email alert subscriptions are being honored at this time. My Blue Sky account has challenged my Twitter feed to a bare-knuckled fight. My Mastodon, Post, and Substack Notes accounts await disaster My RSS feed is a disaster.