When it comes to deadly tragedies and where we put our attention and money, it would seem that, looking at the April 15th Boston Marathon bombings and the April 17th explosion of the fertilizer plant in West, Texas, we go for the glamour—or at least where the television news folks point their cameras—and behave quite irrationally. Perhaps big media’s East Coast fealty and a bit of snobbery towards the South play a role, too. Let’s deconstruct each situation and see what conclusions we can support.

Boston received over a week of saturation TV news coverage while West, Texas received almost none. Boston also received millions of dollars in aid, and West, Texas received relatively nothing.

Yes, the Boston Marathon bombing had a terrorist element absent from the West, Texas tragedy. Need it be said that anything terroristic is elevated to a special place in the individual’s psyche, and in the collective, national psyche—as well it should. Smaller point: the Boston tragedy also had a dramatic, climactic manhunt and capture, right out of a made-for-TV movie.

In comparison to Boston, the West, Texas tragedy so far has shown no aspects of foul play, other than Texas’s meager, pro-business regulatory structure (read: boring). It’s the simple case of a mega explosion in a small town way down South that few have ever heard of versus Beantown, The Boston Marathon, The Red Sox, The New England Patriots, the real patriots, such as Paul Revere, and, of course, the two terrorists. West, Texas has associated with it nothing iconic.

But examine the particulars of each sad story and evaluate for yourself if the attention paid to each tragedy was proportional, as in TV news coverage and compensation being paid to the victims of each. Here are the more particulars.

Fourteen people died in the Boston bombing, over 50 were injured, some losing limbs and going home with injuries that will plague them for life. One of the two bombs killed an 8-year-old boy. Sad, tragic, and made for TV. The devastation in West, Texas was much more severe.

So how did US citizens, if not citizens throughout the world, respond and continue to respond to the Boston bombings versus the horror of West, Texas?

The news coverage that followed the Boston Marathon bombing turned out to be a marathon of its own.

Immediately upon receiving clearance, wall-to-wall satellite trucks brought with them wallpaper news coverage, replete with news anchors who stayed on location—the marathon’s finish line; ground zero—for a week or more. Never mind that Syria’s president Assad was at the time slaughtering hundreds of innocent Syrian men, women, and children daily. It’s as if that story was relegated daily to page nine of the NY Times’ B section, when genocide appears only occasionally on the TV’s bottom-screen crawler.

Also disappointing was that CNN, “The network that more people trust for their news than any other” made the same editorial decisions that the more tabloid-like stations did, focusing its coverage on the Boston bombing exclusively for days, as if no other serious, newsworthy events were happening anywhere else in the world.

But something important was to happen shortly, more important than the de rigeur fundraising rock concert, which, yes, did take begin to take shape in Boston, as soon as Massachusetts-dweller and singer-songwriter James Taylor could hit the airwaves to publicize it.

Boston’s Mayor, Thomas Menino, created a fund for the dead and injured in the April 15th bombings: One Fund Boston. To date, it has almost 62 million dollars in its coffers. The money will be divvied-up amongst the victims by Solomonic attorney Ken Feinstein, who will administer the fund. In a TV appearance, he revealed a bit how the money will be distributed. It ranged from eight thousand dollars for someone who was injured but had only an overnight hospital stay, to $2.1 million dollars for someone who lost a limb. (Remember Feinstein is the very highly regarded, earnest, and television-ready lawyer with considerable experience at this type of thing. He administered the financial apportionments related to the World Trade Center bombing and the BP oil leak, among other tragedies.) “The money is not going to make these people whole again,” he said on CNN. And this is true. But considering what people endured and sometimes lost, large sums money can help ease some of pain, and pay for expensive prosthetics and other medical bills. As you will see, money—and and other forms of relief—are exactly the things that the West, Texas folks would require but would never receive.

April 17th the West Fertilizer Company plant exploded in a town named West, near Waco, Texas. As in Boston, fourteen people died. However in West, the wounded and material damage were exponentially greater than in Boston. Yet to date, according to CNNMoney.com, the money raised for the West, Texas Disaster Relief Efforts Fund totals $140,000. Sixty-two million dollars versus one-hundred-forty thousand. No, this is not a typo.

Two-hundred people were injured, and over one-hundred-twenty were hospitalized. The blast reduced many adjacent houses to wartime carpet-bombing rubble. The explosion destroyed a 50-unit apartment building. It demolished a nursing home. It also damaged a nearby school. The force was so massive that it left a crater ninety-three feet around and ten feet deep. A monumentally furious detonation.

In addition to destroying buildings and homes, it disappeared two fire trucks and vaporized the first responders near them. And, according a surviving firefighter, who took refuge behind a large truck immediately before the explosion, a coworker told him that he observed the blast lifting the firefighter thirty-five feet out of his rubber boots. Quite an explosion. Quite an explosion compared to the two in Boston. Oh, and by the way, FEMA to date has refused to provide ANY financial relief to West, Texas, but that’s fodder for another article.

Shortly after the West explosion, which happened in the evening, the news outlets provided sporadic coverage. Come daybreak, the major national players and local news outlets had reporters on the scene, and the majors revisited the site and did one- to two-minute live shots for about three days thereafter. Then it was back to total Boston focus.

It may be offensive to compare Boston’s and West’s carnage and ask if it’s fair that Boston garnered twenty times more news coverage and tens of millions of dollars more in relief donations than did West. But if Ken Feinstein can assign monetary value to arms, legs, and days spent in the hospital, the it would seem that everything is grist for the analytic mill.

All things considered—the money, the news coverage, even the East coast cache— it would seem to make this a case, literally, of disparate (ordnance) impact. The Boston pressure cooker bombs were right of the pages of al-Queda’s “How to make a bomb in the kitchen of your mom,” from their online Inspire magazine. Get the visual? Small. The West explosion, in terms of damage done, made the Boston bombs look like firecrackers by comparison, e.g., the West blast leaving a crater big enough to swallow a few school buses. And of course West’s casualties and property damage dwarfed Boston’s. It’s reasonable, therefore to ask if the differences in attention and money paid are fair, if not morally correct, and just as important, to try to explain the differences.

Was the gigantic disparity in money raised and attention paid simply more news coverage equals more donations? Silly, sad, and commonplace in a media environment in which one cable news outlet played in succession eleven instant replays of the British royal couple leaving the hospital with their newborn, as the commentator, overcome with emotion, gushed, “Absolutely remarkable!” Absolutely remarkable for the hundreds of homeless in West, Texas, devoid of attention and with no help on the way. After all that devastation, already we have forgotten them. Absolutely remarkable.