President Obama is joining the chorus complaining about how the press spent so much more space covering the Titan submersible disaster than it did the catastrophe of the fishing boat that foundered while smuggling refugees off the coast of Greece. The former president is seeking a standard of “news equity” — a relatively recent term —  that’s impossible to meet.

“There is a potential tragedy unfolding with the submarine that is getting,” Mr. Obama told an audience in Athens before confirmation that the submersible had no survivors, “you know, minute-to-minute, coverage, all around the world, and, you know, it’s understandable, because we all want and pray that those folks are rescued.”

Mr. Obama lamented, though, “the fact that that’s got so much more attention than 750 people who sank” aboard the smuggler’s vessel, although unlike the Titan, it didn’t go down with all hands. Seventy-nine died with more missing, but all hope had been lost when the news broke. The Titan was feared trapped on the ocean floor with five souls inside.

Yet Mr. Obama called the disparity in coverage “an untenable situation” and was met with applause. He added on CNN that the “news of the day” demonstrates the “obscene … levels of inequality.” Others picked up the theme, casting the disparity as wealthy lives being valued more than those of common folks.

The New York Times wrote that the Titan “drew enormous attention from news organizations worldwide and their audiences, far more than the boat that sank in the Mediterranean,” ignoring the fact that much of the press builds its rundowns off the self-appointed “newspaper of record,” so they were in a singular position to set the tone.

Had the Times wished to inform its readers more on the Greek tragedy, they could have — as the Sun did — published additional details of what one local newspaper headline called the “Mediterranean Death Voyage,” but there’s only so much space. The Times, moreover, may have out produced any other paper in the amount of coverage it gave to Titan.

Editors chose to cover an unfolding story of compelling drama: People trapped in a tube two-and-a-half miles deep, running out of oxygen, the same way the Apollo 13 mission wasn’t broadcast live as previous lunar missions had been until they radioed home the now immortal words, “Houston, we have a problem.” And that their instruments were showing, in also immortal words, a “main B bus undervolt.”

Mr. Obama can understand this about the news business, since he told the Times upon being appointed president of the Harvard Law Review in 1990, “I personally am interested in pushing a strong minority perspective,” by elevating some stories over others in an unequal fashion.

Like the rest of us, Mr. Obama only has so much bandwidth for news; so, when the Greek government declared three days of national mourning, he’s not known to have suggested that President Biden do the same. He didn’t even tweet about it as he did, say, for the Denver Nuggets’ NBA Championship two days earlier.

Few consumers were demanding coverage of the fishing boat story, either, until it offered a chance to feed the narrative of “equity,” which even the socialist senator from Vermont, Bernard Sanders, failed to define in contrast to “equality.”

Furthermore, the world remains riveted by the RMS Titanic. James Cameron didn’t choose to make a film about the sinking of RMS Lusitania, which killed 1,195 and plunged America into World War I, or of the General Slocum, which burned on the East River in 1904, claiming 1,021 lives — most of them women and children and America’s largest civilian death toll prior to 9/11.

Coverage of the Titan’s fate was more akin to the 1999 disappearance of John F. Kennedy Jr.’s plane off Nantucket. All the unkind things being said about the submersible — hubris, money, privilege, wasted resources — could be leveled at Kennedy’s flight, which resulted in his death along with those of his wife and her sister.

CNN reported that the Kennedy search dragged on after authorities “would have otherwise told a waiting family that it was time to end the operation,” which cost of half a billion dollars, with President Clinton justifying that inequity because of the Kennedy family’s role “in our national lives” and “the enormous losses that they have sustained.”

The coverage for the dead off the Greek coast changed when they could be contrasted with those aboard the Titan, but reducing lost souls to talking points does them a great injustice and ignores that only death is truly equitable.