By most accounts, this was a slow week in the news. After the excitement of President Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday, the headlines mostly turned to analyses of the speech, continued coverage of the Charlie Hebdo terror attack and its international response and a national scandal over whether or not—shock and horror!—a football was slightly deflated at an important Patriots game. This story has huge consequences for the football community, but for those of us who couldn’t care less one way or the other about sports, it was a rather ho-hum time to be browsing Google News. The front page stories of Sunday’s New York Times, for example, focused on tax policy shifts being proposed by eight Republicans, an exploration of the Vatican’s current stance on divorce, new evidence in a 50-year-old murder case and something headlined "North Korea’s Forbidden Love? Smuggled, Illegal Soap Operas."

All of these stories are interesting, but none really constitutes an "event." If the purpose of the news is to inform readers about the most important things happening in the world, the fact that the first page of the second-most widely distributed newspaper in the country was focused on human interest stories would seem to indicate that nothing earth-shattering happened on Saturday, Jan. 24. But that isn’t true. An extremely important event was happening on Saturday—the culmination of an event that had been going on for months—that was featured nowhere on the Times’ front page. Only on page 13 could one find any reference at all to Boko Haram’s continuing massacre in Nigeria, a brutal conquest that has left, by differing estimates, anywhere from several hundred to 2,000 people dead.

On Saturday, the city of Maiduguri came under sustained attack by Boko Haram. This was the most significant attack by the group to date, a direct assault on the largest city in northeastern Nigeria. While Boko Haram was eventually pushed out of the city, several dozen soldiers were left dead, and explosions had rocked the center of the city. This attack was the largest in a months-long campaign through northeastern Nigeria by Boko Haram, a radical terror group which aims to establish an Islamic caliphate in Nigeria and earned public attention in April by kidnapping over 200 schoolgirls. They base much of their ideology around a phrase from the Qur’an that reads "Anyone who is not governed by what Allah has revealed is among the transgressors." The phrase "Boko Haram" itself can be loosely translated from Hausa as "Western education is forbidden."

On Sunday, Secretary of State John Kerry met with Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan and his competitor in the upcoming elections, Muhammadu Buhari, to discuss strategy and U.S. intervention. However, disagreements between the rivals and distrust of the West have led to little progress, as Boko Haram slowly but steadily continues its campaign.

If you’re unfamiliar with the story, you’re not alone. It started in earnest on Jan. 3, four days before the Charlie Hebdo attack dominated the news media for weeks. As Kahlil Oppenheimer pointed out last week in this section, the tragedy in France was based in a Western country and directly threatened Western ideals, making it a more comprehensible story for a Western audience, not to mention a story that’s easier to relate to. Terrorists attacking a successful business in a developed country requires no context; one needs to explain Nigeria’s political leaders, the state of its military as opposed to Boko Haram’s and the strategy (or lack thereof) being used to fight the militants to fully tell the story in Nigeria. Sadly, though, the Western world has lived through enough bombings and killings to fill in the blanks in France for themselves. The attacks were also a retaliation to offensive political cartoons, making it an issue of free expression, a cause Americans were already fired up about after The Interview was pulled from theaters. This made Charlie Hebdo an easier story to focus in on—not to mention a physically safer story for the journalists covering it—but in terms of sheer body count and lasting political implications, the Boko Haram attacks were probably more noteworthy.

Other interpretations exist as to why this has gotten so little press. For one thing, as Simon Allison wrote for the Daily Maverick, "There are massacres and there are massacres...it may be the 21st century, but African lives are still deemed less newsworthy—and, by implication, less valuable—than Western lives." Nigeria is a country far from the U.S. in both geography and culture, and the further people are from an event, the less they tend to care about it. This is to say nothing about Nigeria being an African country. Perhaps we pompous and cynical Westerners have become desensitized to crisis on the African continent, grouping an entire continent into a singular identity. Perhaps we’ve even come to expect such tragedy and zone it out, seeing no foreseeable way to fix it without causing even more strife.

Additionally, Nigerian politicians themselves haven’t publicly discussed Boko Haram. The country’s own president tweeted his condolences to the victims of the Charlie Hebdo attack, as well as a picture of his daughter’s wedding last weekend, but has kept his 140 characters on his own country’s crisis to himself. Media analyst Ethan Zuckerman remarked that this odd silence was due to his upcoming election: "it reminds voters that the conflict has erupted under his management and that his government has been unable to subdue the terror group." Perhaps even more alien and sickening than a politician’s flat refusal to acknowledge a massacre is one’s aloofness toward it. Ahmadu Adamu Mu’azu, a leader in Nigeria’s powerful People’s Democratic Party tweeted about Boko Haram, "We know it’s a political period so some of this [sic] things are expected."

So who’s ultimately to blame? Should we criticize the journalists for not giving Boko Haram the same due diligence as the Charlie Hebdo attackers, just because the story wouldn’t sell as well? Should we blame Nigerian politicians for refusing to acknowledge a crisis in order to serve their own political goals? Should we blame ourselves for not caring about tragedies far from home and far from our own experiences?

We should blame all of them. And more importantly, we should work to correct the problem by becoming educated and raising awareness. Terrorism has become a terrifyingly common event in the modern world, and, like all common events, it is somehow beginning to lose its edge. We demand bigger, ideologically threatening terrorist attacks to pay attention, while politicians can sweep the smaller tragedies under the rug, as the media pursues what will earn them the most followers. But it is a dark and cynical world indeed when the loss of human life for the expressed purpose of spreading terror is getting dull.