What makes news?

Seems that mathematics can explain why some incidents are big news while similar incidents elsewhere are ignored. This depends on information content, which depends on the probability of an event occurring in a certain situation and can be expressed " as the negative of the logarithm (to base 2) of the probability of occurrence of the event, and is measured in bits ". Whatever that may mean. A simple explanation of this concept is that 'man bites dog' is news but 'dog bites man is not'. Naturally, such selective reporting of news leads to outrage on social media, what the author labels as 'whataboutery'.  Thus, the killings in Paris was big news but what about terrorist attacks in Beirut, which killed 40 Shias, just a day earlier. Why was that not as big as Paris? The reason is that killings between Shias and Sunnis are a common occurrence but Paris is celebrated as a city of love. So the information content of the Beirut killings was less than those in Paris. Similarly, what about 70 people dying in floods in Tamil Nadu. That did not make the headlines because the intense concentration of people India means that any natural event results in a large number of deaths on a regular basis. Lightnings, which strike very small areas, have killed over 2,000 people every year since 2005, so 70 people killed in floods, which cover large areas, is hardly news. Mathematics is pure science but news reporting is subjective. Owners of media channels influence how news is reported. Thus the reporting of the Dadri incident, in which one man died, was rabidly anti-government and the news media kept howling about the incident for weeks but a riot in Bihar which killed 4 people, 2 of them by police firing, one day before Mr Nitish Kumar was sworn in on a platform of secularism, was kept quiet. Manufactured news was the subject of a James Bond movie, 'Tomorrow Never Dies' in which Elliot Carver, head Carver Media Group, tries to engineer a war between China and Britain so that he will have media rights in China. Yet, given the history of Europe and the middle east the Paris attacks were not surprising at all, just as 9/11 should not have been a surprise. A British historian, Tom Holland, has traced the conflict between Islam and Christianity, going back to the days of Prophet Mohammad in the 7th century. In the first 20 years after Mohammad started his mission Islam covered large areas, which were Christian till then. Their expansion was stopped by the Byzantine empire. This was followed by the Crusades, then the Ottoman empire and finally the industrial revolution in the west and the discovery of the Americas, with increasing wealth, led to the dominance of Christians in today's world. The Muslims are unable to accept that fact that a global Caliphate is totally impossible today. The media may yet engineer a 'Clash of Civilizations'.