Part of the job of the captain of a cruise ship is to be seen on decks and entertaining the passengers, they are not on the bridge lashed to the wheel 24 hours / day.
The media have advertising to sell, advertising needs viewing figures and viewing figures need a good scandal, no-one is going to watch a show which says, actually Schettino was pretty similar to most captains on cruise ships and sometimes avoidable accidents happen.
I am not saying that Schettino did nothing wrong, he very obviously did, but there is a determined media campaign to daemonise him, the reasons for this are numerous, but consider the following.
There are three main places where the blame could lie, the ship (and ultimately the captain), the company, the Italian flag state, have a guess at which 2 are the main sources of information for the media when they are looking for quotes as to how bad a person / captain Schettino was.
The cruise industry as a whole are desperate for Schettino to be shown to be a one off Maverick, rather than a fallible human, just like all other fallible humans in charge of ships, because if he was just a one off then there is no need for any additional and expensive legislation to stop it happening again.
Combine the above with the media's need to have a big scary villain to raise viewing figures and advertising revenue and the chances of getting a balanced, truthful or even remotely reliable documentary are slim.
I haven't seen any of the documentaries on Concordia yet, but if they are on a par with other documentaries that I have watched about shipping disasters then I would take them with a pinch of salt.
I remember reading a New York Times story on the accident which was deliberately misleading to make it sound as if the captain had broken the law by not holding a passenger drill.
It said "It is a requirement of international law that a passenger drill is held with 24 hours of sailing, no such drill was held on Costa Concordia", now anyone reading that without too much care would assume that the law had been broken, but in fact the cargo had not been onboard for 24 hours, a fact which the NYT was well aware of, but chose to present in a way which twisted the facts and gave the narrative that they wanted to.
The same article had a headline "Concordia Crew Were Not Trained"
There source for this piece of investigative journalism, a passenger, who was totally unqualified to make that statement and whose quote was hidden in the middle of the article to try and keep peoples' attention away from were there attention grabbing headline had come from.
I have seen similar deliberately misleading documentaries about other shipping disasters and each one has followed similar lines.
Don't trust anything that you read in the media from any source (the BBC, an institution which I had previously held in very high regard, ran similar nonsense stories about Concordia"
The truth is simple, Concordia was caused not just by one maverick captain, but by a culture of lax legislation driven by the cruise companies on the part of nation states, by a culture of ignoring what legislation is in place by the cruise companies in favour of profit / convenience and by a culture where if ship's staff raise safety concerns which are liable to cost companies money or damage their reputations they find themselves no longer working for the company.
