It's almost brilliant if you think about it, the way the mainstream media is able to enable our addiction to outrage. For them, it's a well-practiced art. Take yesterday's Trump rally in Tampa, Florida, which CNN has blared on repeat for the past 24 hours. Of course, they've focused in on the adrenaline-guided stragglers shouting obscenities about the mainstream media—CNN above all else.
You can bet that execs at CNN felt the titillating rush of pleasure as they saw the footage. Trump supporters chanted "CNN sucks! CNN sucks!" and booed.
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Here's what CNN's Jim Acosta had to say:
Just a sample of the sad scene we faced at the Trump rally in Tampa. I'm very worried that the hostility whipped up by Trump and some in conservative media will result in somebody getting hurt. We should not treat our fellow Americans this way. The press is not the enemy.
Watch the footage. The placement of the cameras is so well calculated. The camera faces out at an angry crowd, and you get the impression that all of it is unprovoked. Wrong. Classic mainstream media. I can't say for sure what they did to provoke that response, but they did something. Imagine if a Fox News film crew rolled up to a Bernie rally, sporting American flags and top-hats emblazoned with the word "Capitalism."
The outrage cycle is flawless.
The outrage cycle is flawless. Within hours, Politico reporter Marc Caputo had already stepped in to defend Acosta's comments:
"If you put everyone's mouths together in this video, you'd get a full set of teeth," Caputo wrote in a now-deleted tweet.
In response to further outrage, Caputo tweeted: "Oh, no! I made fun of garbage people jeering at another person as they falsely accused him of lying and flipped him off. Someone fetch a fainting couch."
Eventually, he posted a three-part tweet apology. But by then, everyone had moved on to something else, something equally rage-inducing.
