Top 100 Sufferings?

Two semesters ago, I took this module called 'Introduction to World Religion' by Prof. Julius and we had tutorial discussions every other week. In one of the tutorials, we were discussing Buddhism and the topic turned to the Burmese monks protesting against the government and the harsh treatments that they got from the police. The question was is it right for them to protest from the point of view of Buddhism. One comment by one of the student caught my attention, he said that this whole thing was blown out of proportion by the western press mainly due to America's obsession with Buddhism and there are many other sufferings that require more attention than this. Being a slow thinker, I can only come up with a rebuttal two semesters after. My question is which suffering should we tackle first then and who to decide which suffering is the most of them all? So what if it is blown out of proportion by the western media? So what if it's just America's obsession for something exotic? We can all agree that something wrong is going on there and does it really matter in what way people got to know the issue at hand? Granted there might be other more important thing in this world but isn't it good if we can alleviate one suffering no matter in what position it is in the suffering top 100 list?