People complain that I write only negative stories about the cruise lines. Crime, fires, overboard passengers, greedy cruise executives, mistreatment of crew members, blah, blah, blah, does it ever end they ask?

It’s a good question, I suppose. Lots of things go wrong during cruises. I have an endless source of materials for stories to fill this blog. But maybe that’s no reason to fixate on the bad part of cruising, is it? Maybe I should stop writing so many mean stories about unpleasant subjects. Perhaps I should write nice things about the cruise lines and its executives to make people happy.

But I have a question to ask you: why are you reading Cruise Law News right now?

Are you looking for an article comparing the food and service on the Oasis of the Seas to the Norwegian Epic? Or are you trying to find out whether Nassau or Roatan is a more enjoyable port to visit and take your kids? Of course not. Cruise Critic or Travel Weekly or most any other cruise or travel publication have that covered.

I suspect that you are visiting this blog because you’d like to find out the news that the cruise lines don’t want you to know. Yes, the bad news.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a short article about a passenger who fell to his death on the Carnival Magic. There was no mention of the incident anywhere. Not on television, not in newspapers, not anywhere throughout the internet. I wrote the article because a half-dozen cruise passenger contacted me asking if I knew what happened on the ship.

Over 50,000 people read the article on this blog and our Facebook page over the first couple of days it was published. Over 1,500 readers liked, shared, tweeted or re-tweeted the story. Another 500 people liked, shared or commented on the article on Facebook. That’s a lot of people interacting with the story (a popular Yahoo article may have only a dozen or two likes and a handful of comments). The victim’s family and friends read the article and left comments trying to find information about what happened to their loved one.

Cruise lines and FBI often erect walls of silence and lack of cooperation when someone dies or disappears from a cruise ship. The public is hungry to find the truth of what happens at sea. Regular cruisers or travel agents want to inform their family or clients of what they learn on this blog. Families of those lost at sea want to know everything that they can why their loved one perished. The cruise line won’t tell them. There’s really no other reason people read our articles.

Compare the public reaction to that tragic story to the reaction to another article I wrote about Carnival yesterday. The story was entirely complementary about its new CEO, Arnold Donald, whose rose from a modest beginning in the Ninth Ward in New Orleans to a highly successful businessman.

I admire the way that Mr. Donald earned great financial success through the hard work instilled in him by his family and educators. He never forgot his family or his humble beginnings. Every year, he and his wife award scholarships to students from his high school in New Orleans to his college and business school alma maters. He named the new wing of the high school building, which he funded, after his late mom and dad.

But no one cared about the story. It received zero likes, zero tweets and zero shares. I doubt 500 people read it.

People read Cruise Law News because they are looking for answers to the questions that the cruise industry won’t answer. Even cruise fans know that the cruise lines are less than transparent and will try and hide the bad news. So if you want a happy-go-lucky story about dream cruises and fun family vacations, you won’t find it here.