Do you, like me, get the feeling that most of the reporters covering the Costa Concordia disaster have never been on a modern mainstream ship? And that they're painting their pictures of onboard life based on, oh, I dunno, the Titanic movie?

As an example, this today from the Associated Press:

"The Costa Concordia was essentially a floating luxury hotel and many of the passengers embarked on the ill-fated cruise with their finest clothes and jewels so they could parade them in casinos and at gala dinners beneath towering chandeliered ceilings."

Leaving aside the author's past-tense reference to Concordia (does he/she have money on the ship being scrapped instead of refloated?), my main comment is, "Huh?" Luxury hotel? Finest jewels? Gala dinners? Towering chandeliered ceilings? This is a Costa ship we're talking about here, one of the most mainstream of the mainstream, Carnival with an Italian accent, less John Jacob Astor and more, oh, Charo. (Apologies to Princess!)

This and similar comments lead me to one conclusion: Despite the fact that the Concordia grounding was a real disaster, where lives were lost and psyches scarred due apparently to pure and simple hubris, the only reason it's gotten as much press as it has is because it's what the old news guys would call "a murder at a good address" — or, put another way, it's the maritime equivalent of a missing white girl.

And I can prove it. How many of you remember the M/V Bulgaria? Or the M/V Rabaul Queen? The former was a Volga River boat that sank during a storm last July in Russia's central republic of Tatarstan, taking the lives of 122 people. Rabaul Queen sank today off the east coast of Papua New Guinea, with a reported 362 people on board. As of this writing, only 238 of that number had been rescued.

We seem, as a species, obsessively drawn to the death of marvelous things, "ill-fated" voyages that doom beautiful people and beautiful things to a watery grave. The passengers aboard Concordia fit that bill, from a media perspective, because of the longstanding and well-understood cliché of "luxury liners" floating on a sea of champagne, the stars in the sky matching the diamonds and sequins adorning the beautiful people on board. Had Concordia's passengers been simply commuting students and workers — as seems to have been the case with the Rabaul Queen victims — would the world media have devoted quite as much ink to the story? The Google hits tell the tale:

"Costa Concordia" sinking: about 6,620,000 results

"M/V Bulgaria" sinking: about 2,380 results

Note 1: Again, don't read this as my attempting to diminish the Concordia disaster. It was a terrible thing that took a high toll for no good reason.

Note 2: Despite my poking fun at the Associated Press's purple prose above, it's actually an interesting article, discussing the potential for freelance salvagers to begin descending on the ship once all the victims are recovered. "The Mafia," says the article, "even has underwater teams that specialize in going after sunken booty."