People died. Who cares?

Used to be, people complained that the news media were too fixated on death and disaster.

“Chief,” the cub reporter would say, “there’s been a shootout at the mall.” “Anyone dead?” would come the reply.

“Sir, there’s been a car accident.” — “Get any pictures of blood, corpses or solitary shoes?”

“Hey boss, the church is on fire.” — “It ain’t Sunday, there won’t be any people inside.”

Luckily, in our enlightened age, human deaths and misery are just, well, incidental. After all, we’re only harming the planet.

“Oil spill in Black Sea” read a headline last night on the CNN International news ticker. The station has been trumpeting Planet in Peril in big scary letters, with dark theme music and ominous lightning flashes, like some Frankenstein rerun, but this appeared to be real news. I wait to hear if the news is good or bad. It’s worse. It’s terrible. It turns out several ships ran aground in a severe storm in the strait connecting the Sea of Azov with the Black Sea, causing a fuel oil spill. Could be the worst environmental disaster in decades.

By the end of the report, the alert viewer will learn one of those colourful details that modern editors insist reporters insert, to add a just the right touch of fluffy emotion to an otherwise hard, factual, depressing piece. There, as an afterthought, and not even worthy of a mention in the later summary of the news, you learn about the fate of the sailors on the stricken ships: two confirmed dead, dozens missing.

After all, nobody really cares about manual labourers somewhere in central Asia who don’t even speak English. It’s not like they were Western tourists or anything. They don’t really count on CNN. Why headline the piece “Maritime disaster in Black Sea”, or “Sailors dead, missing in storm”, or “30 missing in half-dozen shipwrecks”?

That would be hysterical. Sheer sensationalist alarmism.

(A few more people have been confirmed dead since, and the human tragedy finally made it into the headline.)