Well, look at the tsunami in 2004. Hundreds of thousands died and the white people were the ones you heard about most. It's human nature; Westerners can more easily relate to an American or a German in trouble than a poor Indonesian. I don't think anyone actually thinks the Indonesian lives were worth less than others, but the white people make for a better story.
Look at the example this thread is discussing. 2,000 people killed in Nigeria has gotten far less attention than 17 in France. Not no attention, but definitely less. I'm not saying that everyone writing these stories is racist, just that most Western people are going to relate to French people a lot more than Nigerians.
Recent crimes in the US with black people being killed by white people have garnered a lot of media attention, but much less has been payed to black-on-black crimes, which are much more common.
I think race plays a big role, but poor white people don't get much attention either. If the recent events had happened in Albania instead of France, I doubt there would have been as big of a reaction, with dozens of heads-of-state traveling there to pay their condolences.
Again, I doubt that anyone would say that some lives are worth more than others, but it just happens that certain cases get more media attention. This is a fairly well-established trend. See: Missing white woman syndrome. Race is just one factor. Socioeconomic status is a huge one, and in cases like the above article is discussing, gender matters too, with much less attention being payed to missing men than to missing women.
And again, I'm just speaking comparatively. I've been really annoyed by the SJW types saying that no one cares about black people because I don't think that's true. I have been seeing a lot of coverage of Boko Haram and the NCAAP bombing. (Which I think is a terrible example--no ones died and I'm sure it would have been a much bigger story had it not been eclipsed by France. I don't think that's racism, just the way news works.) It's not that people don't care about non-white people or that those cases aren't covered at all, just that incidents like this tend to get more media attention when white people are involved.