IN his book, Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky, notes that there are two kinds of victims as reported by the global media institutions; the worthy and the unworthy.
The unworthy victims are the many unmentioned thousands killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and all other places by US, Israel and other rapacious imperial warring and occupying forces.
The worthy victims are those whom America and its allies have turned into heroes or sympathetic characters in order to achieve their capitalist agendas.
One has to understand that most global media outlets serve the interests of state and corporate power, which are closely interlinked, framing their reporting and analysis in a manner supportive of established privilege and limiting debate and discussion accordingly.
Chomsky in an earlier paper on mainstream media articulates that there is what he calls the elite media, sometimes called the agenda-setting media because they are the ones with the big resources.
They set the framework in which everyone else operates: The New York Times, BBC and CNN.
The elite media sets a framework within which others operate. 
One has to understand the symbiotic relationship between the elite media, governments and corporations.
Take The New York Times, for example.
It is a corporation and sells a product.
The product is audiences.
It is the advertisers who keep the lights on at The New York Times.
If The New York Times decided to tell the truth about the US government and all the dirty nasty things it and American corporations are doing across the globe, the paper wouldn’t last six months.
The paper serves a particular function, to set the nature and tone of public discourse.
That is why it can lie that a Zimbabwean child had its limbs broken after being thrown into a group of people by ZANU PF militia, when in fact that child had rickets.
That it is why it can claim that President Robert Mugabe called Kenyans thieves.
For all its award-winning report, why is it The New York Times is yet to investigate the effects of sanctions on Zimbabwe.
Zimbabweans are unworthy victims as long as the discourse is framed in terms of US hegemony.
However, Zimbabweans become worthy victims in order to negatively depict ZANU PF and its leadership.
In an article on terrorism in Africa, Neil Clark, drives home this point when he writes: “Compare the relative lack of interest in the victims of terror attacks in Africa with the enormous interest there was in the events in Zimbabwe in the early 1990s.
“The land redistribution programme of the government was in some cases, accompanied by violence.
“There were calls in the West for military intervention to topple President Robert Mugabe for his government’s treatment of the white farmers and for its persecution of the opposition.”
Tony Blair, the great ‘regime-changer’ pronounced: “There can be no question of Mugabe being allowed to stay in power” unless forthcoming elections were held to be free or fair.
But the level of violence that was taking place at the time was exaggerated, as Seumas Milne highlighted in a 2002 essay. 
“In a BBC television interview with Foreign Office Minister Baroness Amos, David Frost talked blithely of, “100 000 people killed by Mugabe supporters over the last two years.”
In fact human rights groups estimate the total number killed on both sides during that period at around 160.
That was still 160 deaths too many, but what happened in Zimbabwe 12 or 13 years ago pales in comparison to the far greater crimes which have occurred in countries such as Nigeria, and which have got far less coverage.
Cecil the lion became a worthy victim.
Why?
The world is going green and animal rights activists have a foot in the door.
It is worth noting that the news about Cecil’s demise came not from Zimbabwe’s media houses, but from Britain.
Cecil was named after Cecil John Rhodes.
The response generated by Cecil’s death from politicians, corporations and animal conservationists is quite telling given that Cecil is not the first, neither is he the last lion to be killed by a hunter.
Interestingly Cecil’s death did not generate that much interest among locals, who only caught up when Westerners began to make noises and talk of banning lion trophies.
Same goes for the elephant poaching at Hwange National Park.
It has to take strangers’ protests for Zimbabweans to take wildlife protection seriously.
In America, the Black Lives Matter movement has suffered setbacks because opinion makers and shapers have said that the activists who are fighting for basic civil and human rights, fast-food workers seeking liveable wages and union rights and students challenging crippling debts are insignificant because they are not being held hostage at gunpoint.
The public has been desensitised so much that an African-American gunned down on the street by a police officer is not news anymore.
The debate on the media attention given the Paris attack in relation to numerous terrorists attacks that have occurred on the African continent illustrate that unless Africans frame and craft their own agendas, they will continue to play second fiddle to the issues that concern Westerners.
African leaders are slow to react when incidents occur in their backyard, while as witnessed in Paris a few days ago and in January when Charlie Hebdo magazine was attacked, Europeans close rank.
Tragedies like the one we see in Paris are daily events in much of the Middle-East, no thanks to the policies of the US, UK, France and other Western governments, but no one reports about them.