Media Finds Way to Tie Titanic Sub Disaster to Illegal Immigration, Because of Course They Did
Unless a miracle plays out thousands of feet under the ocean’s surface, we’re watching a tragedy unfold from afar.
On Sunday, controllers lost contact with the OceanGate Titan submersible, which had five people aboard as it attempted to descend on a voyage to the wreckage of the RMS Titanic.
Oxygen supplies were expected to run out about 7 a.m. Eastern Time on Thursday — and even if the ship were still in an intact condition, a rescue of a crippled submersible from those depths would be entirely unprecedented.
But why focus on the likely OceanGate Titan tragedy, The Associated Press wondered, when we could be focusing on illegal immigrants who perish in boats as they try to cross bodies of water in order to unlawfully enter other countries?
The search for a submersible that disappeared while taking wealthy tourists to see the wreck of the Titanic has transfixed parts of the world. That contrasts sharply with another recent tragedy in which the victims were migrants motivated by desperation. https://t.co/D9A52VwrH1
— The Associated Press (@AP) June 21, 2023
This was the wire service’s tweet on Wednesday afternoon: “The search for a submersible that disappeared while taking wealthy tourists to see the wreck of the Titanic has transfixed parts of the world. That contrasts sharply with another recent tragedy in which the victims were migrants motivated by desperation.”
The article, amazingly, ended up being just as tin-eared as the tweet itself.
“The search for a submersible that disappeared while taking wealthy tourists to see the wreck of the Titanic has gripped many with its grim cinematic elements — a ticking clock, passengers running out of oxygen, and of course, the iconic ocean liner itself, which still captivates the public imagination more than a century after it sank,” read the story’s lede, which was filed from Islamabad, Pakistan.
“In Pakistan, where two of the passengers were from, people flocked to social media with prayers and newspapers covered it heavily. But the outpouring fell far short of the shock and grief over a boat carrying hundreds of migrants that sank recently off the coast of Greece — many of them also from the South Asian country.”
There are, of course, stark differences between the two stories. The AP only mentions the wealth of the passengers aboard the Titan. The much starker difference, however, came in the legal status of those aboard migrant vessel.
That vessel, which sank last Wednesday, involved human smugglers who had overloaded a fishing boat and tried to sail to the coast of Greece; hundreds were lost when the vessel failed to reach Europe after departing from Libya.
Hundreds missing after an overloaded fishing boat with up to 400 migrants on board capsizes off the Libyan coast.https://t.co/BDu6uo7rnx
— UK Justice Forum 🇬🇧 Latest Video News Updates! (@Justice_forum) June 14, 2023
The AP went on to say that the cultural bandwidth allocated for the coverage “also differed in a key way that may explain why it has not elicited quite the same universal attention — these are wealthy adventurers who chose to take a dangerous journey, not children playing or people doing their jobs.”
“Mohammad Afzal, a villager on the outskirts of the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, said he was sad for businessman Shahzada Dawood, who was on board with his son Suleman, but he added: ‘I do not know why wealthy people do such things. Did they spend a lot of money just to see the wreckage of the Titanic?’”
The AP also contrasted the wealth of those aboard the OceanGate Titan with “the desperation that pushed hundreds of migrants to leave their homes and try to reach Italy by boat last week. About 100 were rescued, but more than 500 remain missing, including an unknown number of Pakistanis, after one of the worst migrant shipwrecks in the Mediterranean Sea.”
And while both are tragedies, we’re ignoring the biggest disparity between those onboard the submersible and those who sank in the Mediterranean: One was being done legally by a licensed operator of a high-tech submarine, while another was an attempt to break the law organized by criminal human smugglers facilitating the travel of illegal immigrants.
OceanGate Expeditions Says Titanic Tourist Submarine Has Lost Oxygen, But Search Will Continue https://t.co/9p1AAKpEJm pic.twitter.com/PABk0XOgua
— Baller Alert 🚨 (@balleralert) June 22, 2023
Just because economic inequality and privation exist does not mean that international borders and laws about illegally crossing them do not, or that the latter two can be waived away as minor inconveniences due to the circumstances created by the former.
But this is how the broken media works: Using a viral story as a springboard, it pushes a chosen narrative on us that has little if anything to do with the actual story at hand.
What happened in the Mediterranean last week was indeed a tragedy, but that doesn’t allow us to simply sweep under the rug the ugly circumstances that differentiate what happened off the coast of Greece and the potential loss of the OceanGuard Titan.
It’s no secret how this works. Organized crime syndicates flout international law to smuggle humans in life-threatening conditions to countries where illegal immigrants can potentially make more money by flouting the law. Establishment media and left-leaning politicians encourage this process by attaching no moral onus to either those who risk their own lives or their families’ lives by making the journey, nor do they give anything more than a desultory glance to network of human smugglers that enables this.
And as for national sovereignty, borders, laws and security — pfft, those are practically evils, as far as those doing the reporting are concerned.
As an added bonus, the AP managed to work the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into the narrative, as well.
“In Jerusalem’s Old City, none of the 10 Palestinians interviewed by The Associated Press had even heard of the vanished submersible, though three of them thought at first they were being asked about the migrant ship,” the wire service noted.
“That’s a good question to ask people relaxing on the beach in Italy, but not here,” said Palestinian jeweler Munir Sayej. “Five people might die? Well, five people died here in Jenin, and people are being killed all the time here. Everyone here is thinking about their own lives, their own problems, their own struggles.”
Jenin, by the way, is a West Bank town in which clashes between Palestinian terrorists and the Israel Defense Forces have led to several deaths in recent days. On Wednesday, according to Reuters, three members of a terror cell were killed in Jenin by a drone strike.
So, to sum up the AP’s reporting: Five people potentially dead in what appears to be an unprecedented submersible accident is taking too much attention from dead illegal immigrants jammed onto a boat by human smugglers and from Palestinian terrorists who engaged in skirmishes with the IDF.
Think about this the next time the AP — or any other establishment media organization, for that matter — carps about how the public no longer trusts their reporting.
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