It is less about the media but more about the response of officials. How many boats were send to look for a single submarine? All the way from the France? When they could have been sent to Mediterranean sea as well.
How many boats are sent international if a fishing boat outside Thailand or Norway don't return home? What if a old transport ship goes missing in a storm?
Occasionally we can see here on HN stories about lost sailors being rescued after weeks lost in the water, or shipwrecked on some remote rock. The common theme for those stories is that there wasn't a bunch of ships that went looking for them for weeks. For every person who survived such event, many more died.
When there is a lot of media coverage you also tend to get more reaction by officials, which then generate even more media coverage. It is the same concept why a individual can create a story on HN and reach people at google/facebook/apple, while thousands of users can have an identical situation and never reach a single person from support. It not a fair system but its a very well understood phenomenon.
> How many boats are sent international if a fishing boat outside Thailand or Norway don't return home? What if a old transport ship goes missing in a storm?
The problem is that there's no immediate feedback when they go missing so the search areas are too pointlessly large to even attempt SAR operations. Areas where there's lots of immigration traffic are always monitored, like the Greeks were monitoring the boat before it capsized (enough to get that aerial photo of the overcrowded decks).
The vast majority of Coast Guards aren't stretched to their limits, they're sitting there ready to launch SAR operations if anyone calls, all largely operating for free as a cheap way of supporting maritime trade. The USCG alone responds to tens of thousands of cases a year, rescuing thousands of people. Some corrupt nations skimp on their CGs but that wasn't really the case here.
There is a difference between litterally sending multiple Navies (A), sending whatever SAR assets there are (B) and actively preventing and even prosecuting private SAR assets trying to stage their own rescue ops (C).
The Titan was A, your average fishing boat or other vessel is B. And all those migrants are, and that pisses me off to an incredible degree, C.
The response on sending rescue teams was high even before it got popular on the news. I remember reading some statements that "we sent everything we can" in the very first news.
There wasn't really a discrepancy in response though, and if you are lost at sea and have nothing to hang onto...you aren't going to last long. I saw someone ask why the US didn't send ships to look for migrants, well...that's a 10-day ride across the Atlantic & Mediterranean. Even surrounding countries were sometimes hours away.
The average human can't tread that long without a life jacket, the average is ~2-3 hours and that's in still water (to be a lifeguard you have to last 30 minutes), not a choppy ocean/sea. By the time any country other than Italy or Greece came to the location, they'd already be dead. It's tragic, but there is no discrepancy. If there were a chance of actual survival for days, there would have been a much larger response.
Also, apparently the Greeks offered aid before the boat even sank and the boat declined because they didn't want to go to Greece, they wanted to go to Italy. There are mixed reports on that though as now some are blaming the Greek coast guard for tipping the boat over by accident.
If you want something to be upset about, be upset about practically every country on Earth's broken immigration systems that cause these tragic events.
There are multiple reports, and investigations, into illegal push backs of migrant vessels by FRONTEX and, yes, the Greek Coast Guard and Navy. Enough for me to not cut them any slack anymore.
Regarding the US Navy, well, they do have a Fleet in the Mediterranean, it's not like they had to sail all the way from Pearl Harbour.
The US Navy isn't capable of rescue missions like that, the US Coast Guard is. The nearest US Navy vessel were still probably hours away, even if they were equipped. So much reaching here to find an impossible task when you have 2-3 hours to operate the rescue. By the time a US ship arrived everyone would be dead. Not to mention that requires Greece and Italy to ask for help.
One has to love how over the last decade or so, we were all convinced that all sea going vessels do not have the obligation to help others in distress. Because they absolutely do.
Also, what people also forget, the Mediterranean is under almost comlkete surveillance. So no big surprise if a vessel goes down, most of the time authorities knew of said vessel before.
The US has quite a few shops scattered around the world at all times. The 22nd, 24th, and 26th Marine Expeditionary Units patrol the Atlantic and Mediterranean.
And yet, still all probably hours away from the incident, which renders them going there pretty pointless. Especially when they aren't equipped for these sort of rescue operations like the Coast Guard to begin with.
Exactly. You use a lot of resources to send help on the other side of the world for people who volunteeringly went to bottom of the ocean knowing risks and just for fun.
But you don't use resources to help people who are forced to leave their country and now are drowning in the sea.
