Be honest. Do you care about all tragedies in the world equally? Do you feel as strongly about the Paris attacks as about say, a bombing in Baghdad, or the shooting of Sudanese migrants at the Egyptian Israeli border? The honest answer is probably no. And that is fine.

There have been many voices complaining that the Paris attacks have received more global attention than similar attacks in Lebanon and Iraq, and that the global news agenda is more sensitive about the loss of white western lives than others. This is technically a sound point. Ideally we should care about all deaths equally, but it’s human nature that we do not. Not out of some crass disregard for the lives of others, but the simple limitations of what we can care about, its proximity to home, and how it grabs our attention.

There have been many voices complaining that the global news is more sensitive about the loss of white western lives

Yes the media is skewed, but we, the consumers, are also complicit – in that media is no longer a top-down affair, transmitting information to inert readers or watchers. We determine the news agenda far more than previously. Social media and, more crucially, the ability of new organisations to gauge which stories get the most hits, attention and circulation, mean that we are now as guilty of determining the agenda as editors are, if not more. There is something sanctimonious, maybe even hypocritical, about placing the onus purely on the media – they are often only reflecting back our chatter and activity back at us. The Beirut bombings actually did get quite a lot of coverage, but the news stories about them didn’t get much traction.

It is also not as neat an imbalance as you might think. The nature of the news incident is also important. There is some combination of factors that render something a news story worthy of supreme attention – an certain out-of-the-ordinariness, the presence of a simple evil assailant.

A mass attack in the heart of Paris is a less frequent event than a bombing in the Middle East. By the same token, a campus shooting is a more common occurrence in the US than it is anywhere else, and coverage of shooting events have lately been relegated down the front pages, due to frequency. It sounds churlish, but that is news.

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Editors do have discretion as to what item they believe deserves attention, but that is also dependent on how many people are likely to read or watch it. The Westgate attack in Nairobi got far more play in the global press than the Garissa massacre, even though they were both in the same country perpetrated by the same type of attacker. What is news and what is not is a complicated algorithm that doesn’t necessarily fall along the lines of white deaths bad, others indifferent.

It is undeniable that the western media is hardwired to care more and cover western stories more, and from a western point of view. Of course, western media outlets tend to have the benefit of greater resources. They broadcast in English, a global lingua franca, and they take advantage of a global cultural hegemony that amplifies their concerns far more widely than is reasonable. But CNN has the right to focus on material from its originating culture, as much as al-Jazeera does from an Arab or Middle Eastern point of view.

But we can all do better, as journalists and as news consumers, to project global events, broadcast information and make victims feel less alone. This means paying attention to more high-impact events that are out of our comfort zones, rather than cherrypicking those that make the disparity of care point best, and guilt-tripping others for not paying equal attention all the time. Otherwise we just undermine the sense of solidarity that we claim to be seeking.