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As a missing submersible with five wealthy passengers received days of nonstop media coverage, more than 700 people are feared dead in one of the worst migrant shipwrecks in the Mediterranean. Former President Barack Obama said in a Thursday interview on CNN that the uneven media attention received by the two tragedies was emblematic of the economic inequality plaguing democracies.
The U.S. Coast Guard said Thursday that the five people in the submersible were killed after the vessel suffered a “catastrophic implosion.” The submersible went missing on Sunday while carrying passengers on a $250,000 tourism trip to visit the wreckage of the Titanic.
Just days earlier in Greece, a fishing boat carrying hundreds of migrants to Italy sank in front of a Greek coast guard ship. With more than 700 people feared dead, many are calling for an investigation after the Greek coast guard decided not to intervene to prevent the boat from sinking.
Speaking from Athens with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, Obama said that one of the most pressing threats to democracy is “obscene inequality.”
“Right now we have 24 hour coverage — and I understand it — of this submarine, the submersible that tragically is right now lost at the bottom of the sea,” Obama said in an interview conducted hours before the U.S. Coast Guard confirmed the deaths of the five passengers. “At the same time, right here, just off the coast of Greece we had 700 people dead, 700 migrants who were apparently being smuggled.”
“It’s made news, but it’s not dominating in the same way. In some ways, it’s indicative of the degree to which people’s life chances have grown so disparate,” he added. “It’s very hard to sustain a democracy when you have such massive concentrations of wealth.”
Some, however, focused less on the difference in media attention and more on the unequal response from state authorities.
Former Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth wrote in a statement that for him “the real difference was in the governmental reaction.”
“Governments pulled out all the stops to try to save the five mainly wealthy people exploring the Titanic ruins, but when it came to hundreds of migrants packed into an obviously precarious boat, the Greek Coast Guard made only token efforts to help before it sank,” Roth wrote. “That was not accidental.”
“The European Union’s approach to migration across the Mediterranean is to discourage rescue because that provides an immediate opportunity to seek asylum,” Roth added. “Rather, by avoiding rescue opportunities, the E.U. hopes that the greater chance of drowning at sea will deter would-be migrants.”
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