The sinking feeling of 'the other'

The sinking  of the Costa Concordia off the coast of Italy is shocking.  The deaths of the passengers and crew a tragedy.  Five people are confirmed dead and fifteen are missing.  The story has dominated the UK news across all of the media.  All this in the hundredth anniversary year of the sinking of the Titanic.  But as Ian Jack in this weekend's Guardian noted: 'Two years after the Titanic, a coal boat rammed the Empress of Ireland when the Liverpool-bound liner got stuck in a fog in the St Lawrence. The liner heeled over and sank within 14 minutes, and more than 1,000 people drowned: men, women and children struggled in the water "as thick as bees", according to a survivor, but no stories of self-sacrifice or selfishness emerged. It had all happened too quickly. The Titanic, on the other hand, took two hours and 40 minutes to go down on one of the stillest nights anyone could remember. Enough time for quandaries, conflicts, and good and bad behaviour.'  He also reminds us that Titanic was neither the fastest nor the largest liner operating at the time, and 'White Star line never advertised her unsinkability beyond a cautious sentence in a short-lived brochure of 1910'. What is shocking to me in 2012 watching the television coverage of the Costa Concordia is the obscene disparity between this and the sinking of the ferry off Indonesia in December of last year with almost a hundred killed, or the loss of the Zanzibar ferry in September with almost 200 drowned, and so it goes on.  But then western European lives are worth more in the hard currency of media reporting than those of 'the other'.  Always have been.  Ask Edward Said.