Journalism, like so much of what is seen and heard in the modern era, is theatre. The news – the culmination of stories read and broadcast for public consumption and education – is more an art than science. As with all art, it is vital to the soul. It provides meaning and context for the world at large.
But like any art, it is subjective.
There are tenets to reporting. An individual should be prompt, precise, ethical, and above all else, impartial. However, these principles can, and have, become malleable. The very nature of reporting renders impartiality impossible.
Journalism is often cited as the first draft of history. But a journalist, a physical fallible person, pens that draft. An individual – with all the hopes, fears, and prejudices that come with living life – decides what and who is worth remembering in that draft.
And the motives behind that choice are not always pure.
June 18, 2023, a private submersible operated by OceanGate Expeditions lost communication with its surface vessel while descending toward the wreckage of the infamous Titanic. The submersible, known as Titan, went missing along with the five extremely affluent men onboard. It was a wayward speck of metal in the seemingly endless expanse of the ocean. It was a ghost, unknown and unseen. And for the next eight days, it was the foremost story for every major news outlet.
International rescue efforts were immediately launched, cost be damned. Aircraft dropped radar buoys to listen for sounds. Ships were rerouted to patrol the turbulent waves. Experts were rushed onto primetime shows for comments then asked to comment on other experts’ comments. The story had everything journalists look for.
Novelty. Timeliness. Conflict. Mystery. Human interest.
A communal decision was made by dozens if not hundreds of journalists, and then executed. The Titan submersible and the five souls aboard would be the top story and dominate the public consciousness. It would be over a week before the world would learn that all the searching, debating, attention, and money was for naught. The submersible experienced a catastrophic implosion the same day, if not very second, communication had been lost. The world had been chasing not just a ghost, but a shadow of one.
The story was everything to the news outlets… except deserving of its newsworthiness.
June 14, four days prior to the Titan’s disappearance, another vessel would suffer an even greater catastrophe. A fishing trawler off the coast of Greece capsized. There were not five affluent men aboard the ship, but 750 men, women, and children.
All migrants.
646 would drown, and the story was barely a blip on the networks and papers. The reporting was cursory and impersonal. It happened. It was a shame. But was it really worth dwelling on?
Even as the first draft of this op-ed was written, news outlets continued to report on the Titan submersible. The Washington Post, CBS, the BBC, numerous outlets published stories detailing how one Titan passenger brought a Rubik’s Cube with him on the journey in preparation for setting a record. Such reporting should never have been news. Media outlets devoted more resources on the pocket contents of a Pakistani millionaire’s son than on any of the hundreds of destitute predominantly Pakistani migrants who drowned on their smuggler’s boat.
Who are these people? What are their stories? What are their names? What drove 646 unique individuals to step onto the ship that would become their killer?
I do not know their names, nor do I know their faces. But I know what it feels like to drown. Your lungs burn in a way that cannot be expressed in words. Your limbs tense with such shock your muscles paralyze themselves. The intimacy of mortality is forgotten and your eyes widen when you feel the water push against the interior of your chest, choking you from the inside, and you discover you cannot scream.
I was brought back by a hand plunged into the water, but they were not. Those men, women, and children have no future, no graves, and by the collective whim of the news networks, no past. Is it because they have no money? Is it because their families have no open platform to voice their objections and sorrow? Is it because of something else?
The New York Times authored an interactive feature called Portraits of Grief a decade after the 9/11 terrorist attacks to ensure the victims and their families were not forgotten. Why report on tragedies a decade later when the freshly dead are not even named? Nostalgia? Perversion?
Even before their deaths, these migrants were no stranger to abandonment. It was discovered that Greek authorities were aware of the distressed trawler at least 13 hours before it sank. According to multiple survivors, it may even have been the Hellenic Coast Guard that caused the migrant vessel to capsize.
The media regularly commits the impartial sin of choosing who and what is worth remembering. There’s no way around it. It’s what we do with every keystroke. The journalism industry inflates social interest in stories when internet traffic, advertisers, and financial donors reward outlets with attention. Journalists are conditioned to respond to these stimuli at the exclusion of doing our duty as impartial recordkeepers.
But what happens when that fact is put into a journalist’s face, when you present a topic that checks off every box for a story but it isn’t easy, sexy, or likely to result in prestige? What happens when the gatekeepers can’t pretend they’re busy and look away?
January 10, 2018, the Director of Emergency Services for a NATO base in Novo Selo, Bulgaria was found dead, two weeks before he was scheduled to return home. Per the official US government records, the 58-year-old, 37-year veteran died of a myocardial infarction while sleeping – a heart attack – brought on by arteriosclerosis. His belongings were cleaned and packed, and his body was cremated and given to his family in short order.
Unofficially, the man was likely beaten, interrogated, and possibly assassinated.
The man’s family was leaked photographs showing blood splatter across the walls of his locked apartment and his bruised corpse lying face down in inch-deep pools of blood. Drawers had been emptied. Computers and phones had been accessed. US government records had been falsified to show he was on station three days prior, not missing. During his autopsy, the man’s eyes and portions of his face were “misplaced,” forcing the family to identify him by the tattoos on his back. His body was not refrigerated during storage and US personnel refused to perform an investigation citing “natural causes” as his death. Over a decade of his medical records, across two separate military branches, were discovered missing as well. Even the modest memorial placed outside the base’s fire station – paid for and built by the man’s subordinates – was ordered ripped from its concrete anchors and destroyed by US officers.
To be figuratively nameless and literally faceless, this man was intended to be forgotten.
Bulgarian officials performed their own investigation before leaking documentation to the man’s family. Since then, the family has tried to generate discussion, to be seen and heard, as they gather more documents and do what they can to share the truth.
But there’s been no interest from any outlet or journalist with the resources to help. The story isn’t sexy. It doesn’t fit DEI bingo or fall into a rubber stamp category for award ceremonies. It’s just one old, white, straight, middle-class American.
Journalists’ responses have ranged from apathy, to skepticism, to schadenfreude.
“Where’s the novelty?”
“Things happen over there.”
“Someone else will report on it if it’s a story.”
“He wasn’t important enough to be killed.”
Why should these phrases be so freely uttered by the men and women who control the news? Why the litmus test? Were similar phrases repeated for each of the 646 drowned migrants? Were they discussed as individuals at all?
I remember the things said about the man, just like I remember his missing face. He was the hand that plunged into the water to pull me out.
He was my father.
I watch from both sides of the emerald curtain as journalists choose who is newsworthy, what’s worth remembering, in exchange for personal prestige. A person’s race should not matter. Their wealth should not matter. A story’s web traffic should not be the primary goal. Fear of reporting off trends or that members of the general public would expect the same coverage later is no excuse for willful neglect.
A journalist’s duty is to inform the world, ethically. We gleefully fail that duty. A human’s rights go beyond simply living. Not everyone has the freedom of speech. Not everyone has a platform for speech.
Remember that, when you decide what, and who, makes it into history’s first draft.