What makes news?

A fishing boatload of refugees, a submarine, and news coverage

Photo by Maria Oswalt on Unsplash

Priyamvada Gopal is a Professor of Post-Colonial Studies at Churchill College, Cambridge. She has graduate degrees in English from Nehru University and from Cornell, including a doctorate from the Ithaca New York university. Gopal wrote an opinion piece for Al Jazeera last week about the difference in coverage between the lost submarine off the coast of Newfoundland and people crammed onto a fishing boat that sank off the coast of Greece roughly around the same time.

Why this disparity? The crude, if dismaying, answer is that ours is a world in which the lives of a few matter significantly more than the lives of the many, a disparity that intensifies along geopolitical, class, race and caste lines. The poor, the vulnerable and the victims of war clinging to the sides of a rubber dinghy are not “mournable” in the same way as the wealthy white man figured as an “explorer” or “adventurer” who goes to sea in an expensive bespoke vessel.

Canadian journalist Anthony Germain retweeted a clip of Gopal from Al Jazeera’s feed and that’s how your humble e-scribbler found it. “Interesting, difficult ideas here to discuss with my journalism students,” Germain wrote. Absolutely true, too. The ideas are interesting and difficult. Good stuff for journalists to think about but also good stuff for the rest of us to think about as we take in the images and words presented to us on the Internet and on our televisions and radios.

On the face of it, Gopal is right. The lives of a few matter more than the lives of most of us. This is a facile claim, though. A cliché. It’s superficial and simplistic. Light. And while light things normally float away, Gopal’s argument sinks once one gets past that relatively superficial level of “race and class” Gopal told Al Jazeera about in contrasting the story of the five in the submarine with “the boat full of ‘illegal’ brown people making a risky bid to enter Fortress Europe.”