It may come as a surprise to many but a large majority of Muslims are not Arabs, and a substantial number of Muslims live as a minority in various other countries. With about 180 millions Muslims, India has one of the highest Muslim populations in the world. However, they are considered a minority since the country’s population is over a billion.

Muslim population in the United States is estimated to be around 5 million, thus forming 1.6% of the US population. Both Indian Muslims and US Muslims are part of a rich tradition of living in a secular and democratic country. While the history of Muslims in India is over a thousand years, Islam in the US is a recent phenomenon.

The two populations of Muslim minorities, separated by thousands of miles, have recently found themselves focusing on some disturbing incidents in their respective countries.

The first happened in India, where on May 25, a mob attacked Muslim villagers of Atali, a village about 50 kilometres from nation’s capital Delhi. The mob destroyed the under-expansion mosque, burned properties and looted business. Many Muslims were injured, the fear thus created forced 500-odd Muslims to take shelter at the local police station.  They refused to go back to their homes for days until their demands were met.

The second incident occurred in the United States just a few days after the first incident. On Friday May 29, a Muslim woman wearing a hijab,Tahera Ahmad, was refused a can of unopened soda by a flight attendant, who said Tahera could use it as a weapon. She was deeply hurt by the treatment and other similar bigoted comments from a fellow passenger. “I am in tears of humiliation from discrimination,” Tahera wrote on her Facebook page.

As an editor myself, both stories are important and worthy of being told- one is about the physical and mental violence of hundreds of Muslims, just an hour away from the capital of a secular and democratic country and the second story on emotional harassment that an environment of Islamophobia creates for individual Muslims. However, if I have to decide between the two, I will go with the first story because it is reflective of a growing environment of communal violence that seems to be increasingly making Muslims and Christians uncomfortable ever since the new government took office a year ago.

If the scale of violence (no one died) was not enough to do the story, there was a definitely a “hook” to do it and for an international readership to be interested in it:  the violence occurred just a day before the one year anniversary of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government under the leadership of Narendra Modi. Modi was the Chief Minister of Gujarat in 2002, when over a thousand Muslims were massacred in a ghastly riot.

But alas! That was not the case. I searched for the two stories in the press of different countries, using the Google News Advanced Search Functionality to limit by location. The results are very interesting. In all the countries that I checked, Tahera Ahmad got more coverage than the poor Muslims of Atali village. Except, of course, India, where Atali was covered fairly well – there were more than nine thousand articles on Atali while only six mentioned the Tahera Ahmad story.

It was the opposite in the United States, site of our second story, where there were almost fourteen thousand stories on Tahera Ahmad but only seven on Atali. All seven stories were from TwoCircles.net, a news site that covers Indian news but since it is based in the US, Google News counts it as part of USA.

I repeated my search terms (“Tahera Ahmad” AND “United Airlines” for story one, and “Atali” or “Ballabgarh” for story two) while changing the location term to different countries.

I started with the United Arab Emirates because it has a big Indian population and many Indian journalists work with UAE publications. I was sure they would have been paying close attention to Indian stories. While there were nine stories on Tahera Ahmad, there was only one story on Atali. The story was published in the Gulf News and directly sourced from the Press Trust of India (PTI).

Next, I looked into Saudi Arabia where I didn’t find anything at all. So, I searched directly on the Arab News website, the major English daily of the kingdom. While I found four stories on Tahera Ahmad there was nothing on Atali. Similarly,Al Jazeera’s English website has two stories on Tahera Ahmad but nothing on Atali.

The Indonesian and Turkish press did hundreds of stories on Ahmed’s ordeal but the media in most other countries did no more than 2-3 stories. On the other hand, Atali didn’t even register for most of the press in Muslim countries. Only the Turkish press had more than one story, but sadly none in English.Gulf News carried one story on Atali; it was syndicated from PTI. Another story that appeared in Egypt was on the OnIslam.net website.

Why is it that Tahera Ahmad, who was born in India and now lives in the United States, getting more coverage that 500 Muslims who continue to live in India, and for days, were unable to go back to their homes? The only reason I can think of is that the Western media still drives the agenda of press even in Muslim countries.

The New York Times, one of the most respected names in journalism, carries a curious phrase on its masthead every day – “All The News That’s Fit To Print”.  It was coined more than a century ago to supposedly separate NYT from all publications indulging in sensationalism. And given NYT’s huge influence over politics and culture, it is almost a claim that whatever they don’t publish is not news or at least news not worth knowing about.

In that context, it is important to pay attention to what is covered and what is not covered by your favourite newspaper, TV channel, or news website. Who makes the decision on what to cover and what is to be left off the pages? Which incidents deserve more space? Should we put our resources on stories affecting one person closer to home or something that impacts hundreds of lives thousands of miles away?

These are difficult questions that news editors all over the world grapple with every day. But the answers to the questions are often contingent on personal biases of the people making these decisions.  The pressure of social media, cost-cutting measures of owners, and laziness of journalists are forces that have all aligned to weaken editors and their decision-making abilities. Now what trends on social media will more often than not be covered by the press.

But social media comes with its own skewed user demographics. It is not a representation of the global population. What trends on social media may not be the reality of the day. News of Western nations still get far more coverage in the world press than happenings in other parts of the world.