Recent days have rightly seen blanket coverage of the shooting of seven people including four at a Jewish school in France and the subsequent death of the man responsible.

However, the tone of the coverage was in marked contrast to the reporting of the horrific incident of mass murder which took place last year in Norway.

There, the international media were all too ready to suggest that the killer, Anders Breivik, was a “fundamentalist Christian”, even though that was something of a stretch. Breivik, while certainly hard-right in his politics, was really a sick loner who lived in a demented world of his own.

But in the French case, even though the man responsible, Mohammed Merah, was a known Al Qaeda sympathiser, almost no media outlets were willing to report that he was a Muslim. 

In a quick look at how some of the major media outlets covered the story of his death, the websites of the RTE, BBC, CNN, MSNBC, Retuers and the Guardian barely reported that Merah was a Muslim. Instead, they reported it implicitly, noting that French President Nicolas Sarkozy warning against any backlash against French Muslims.

This isn’t the first time the media has been so reluctant to call attention to the Islamic identity of someone who has committed murder. In 2009, when a US Army doctor, Major Nidal Malik Hasan shot and killed 13 people at Fort Hood in Texas, President Obama warned that people should not “jump to conclusions” about the man’s motivation. 

This reluctance is in some ways reasonable because it stems from a desire not to stigmatise a whole group of people because of the violent actions of some of their extremist members. However, this reticence would be a lot more admirable if were even-handed. The leap to judgement in the case of Breivik demonstrated that too many in the media have one standard when it comes to Islam, and another one when it comes to Christianity.

This week, a European human rights body, the Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians in Europe, provided further evidence of growing discrimination towards Christians.

For example, it pointed to research showing that a large percentage of the rising level of vandalism in France is directed against Christian places of worship. It showed that in the UK, 74pc of people believe that intolerance of Christians is rising. And cited dozens of examples of anti-Christian prejudice across Europe.

The report, like the incidents, passed almost unnoticed in the mainstream media. 

The persecution of Buddhist monks in Burma was an international story for weeks in 2007. The plight of Tibetan Buddhists is a cause celebré among many of the great and good; celebrities such as Richard Gere and Martin Scorsese are vocal supporters of Tibetan independence. By contrast, incidents of atrocities against Christians in the Middle East, Asia or Africa receive little attention and almost no celebrity support

If the media is to live up to its mission to provide balanced, informative and truthful coverage of world events, this is an issue which needs urgent improvement.