While the media provides breathless coverage of a tragedy involving a billionaire's yacht, they routinely neglect the plight of the thousands of migrants who perish elsewhere in the Mediterranean.
|
Listen To This Story
 |
— OPINION —
If you follow the news, you will undoubtedly have heard that a luxury sailboat carrying British tech tycoon Mike Lynch and 21 other people, including 10 crew members, capsized off the coast of Sicily (and, if you haven’t heard, here are stories from the Associated Press, New York Times, BBC, The Guardian, CNN, NBC, just to name a few).
And, would you believe it, thousands of people drowned in the Mediterranean.
Now, you may ask yourself how that is possible. If you clicked on any of those links, you will know that one body has been recovered while six others, including Lynch, are still missing.
So, something doesn’t add up.
You would be correct.
What doesn’t add up is that the media pays outsized attention to this tragedy (and it undoubtedly is a tragedy) because it involves a billionaire and a fancy yacht.
At the same time, the same news outlets and many others are routinely ignoring the plight of the hundreds of thousands of people who are trying to cross the Mediterranean to reach Europe in the hopes of a better life.
Many of them don’t make it.
In fact, the European Union (EU) says 28,000 people have presumably died in boating accidents over the past decade.
Obviously, we hope that those still missing off Sicily will be found. If they are not, however, and this regrettable accident results in seven deaths, then it would take the sinking of 4,000 luxury yachts to reach that same number of 28,000 people.
That’s more than one yacht per day over an entire decade.
This also means that more than seven migrants on average have gone missing in the Mediterranean every single day since 2014.
And that’s just the official figure. The real number may be much higher. After all, the EU report on these deaths also stated that 615,000 migrants were rescued during that time.
While you may have heard that not only Lynch is missing but also his daughter Hannah, as well as Morgan Stanley executive Jonathan Bloomer and his wife Judy, you will never learn the names of any of those thousands of migrants who died trying to cross the Mediterranean in ramshackle dinghies.
Another key difference is why any of these people were on their respective yachts/boats to begin with. As we noted above, the migrants are often escaping war, poverty, and famine. They hope that a fresh start in Europe will afford them the opportunity to lead better, safer, and more prosperous lives.
Conversely, Lynch and his guests were celebrating that the billionaire recently beat fraud charges in the US. He was accused of inflating the value of his company Autonomy before he sold it to Hewlett Packard for $11.7 billion.
None of this is to say that the media shouldn’t cover the sinking of a yacht with some financial heavyweights on board. It is a tragedy.
However, it is also tragic that the media will provide breathless coverage of what happened in Sicily while routinely neglecting to report on the plight of the thousands of migrants who perish elsewhere in the Mediterranean.
