There's a formal field of study related to the newsworthiness of rare events like accidents. Essentially, you sum up the "value" of people that died all at once

There's a formal field of study related to the newsworthiness of rare events like accidents. Essentially, you sum up the "value" of people that died all at once, and certain thresholds elevate that to "local news", "national news", or "international news". Sure, it might seem horribly cold to think of people as having value, but they do. A simple metric is to take their annual income, and pretend it is an interest payment on some cash in a bank account. Typical westerners are hence worth a few million dollars. Lebanese refugees? A few tens of thousands each, if that. The billionaires in the sub added up to more than the refugees on the boat. That's it. It's that simple. If Trump, Bezos, Gates, or Musk die, it's guaranteed to be global news, one hundred percent. If ten ordinary people die? Eh... nobody cares. To put things in perspective, in the same period of time that the sub was being searched for, about a week, globally we lost: About 25,000 people to car crashes. About 30,000 to preventable diseases. About 50,000 to industrial accidents and work-related diseases. And a mere 5,000 or so to the war in Ukraine. That boat near Greece? It barely rates. It's a statistic.