Manufactured Outrage

I love today's word of the day at Urban Dictionary. This has been happening so much lately, I'm glad someone coined a word for it. The evening news programs are the masters, but other media outlets are just as bad.

Manufactured Outrage

A falsified righteous outrage at things that are basically unimportant and meaningless, frequently employed by politicians, political activists, or the media. Politicians and talking heads use it to garner support for their causes, to claim the moral high ground and to tar their opponents; the media often just uses it in a cynical bid to increase ratings.

Manufactured outrages of note include Nipplegate, the Monica Lewinski scandal, the 2009 tea partys, backmasked satanic lyrics, lapel pin controversies...

Just about any time you hear any politician, activist, or radio show host getting outraged about anything, really. The louder and angrier they get, the harder they're working at manufacturing it.

by Aquillion2 May 20, 2009

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An invention of the mainstream media, aka MSM, intended to drum up outrage at a statement or situation. The key characteristics of manufactured outrage are: prior to the media's intervention, the vast majority of the general population had never heard of the statement or had never found the statement or situation to be objectionable in any way.

by Ellsworth Dec 18, 2006