The second goal is to make money and to make money it needs to make advertisers think that their ads are going to be seen by a lot of eyes so that said advertisers will pay them for the privilege of being seen by their audience. This means that it must put on interesting and dynamic programming in order to make you pay attention to it.

Neither one of these points is breaking news to anyone, but when you put these two goals together you get some nefarious outcomes. One of these outcomes is making a small thing seem like it’s a dire event.

For exhibit A, I direct your attention to this horrifying story from CBS News where they, via their Twitter feed, exposed the fire department recruits in D.C. showing the “white power symbol.”

“D.C. Fire Department recruits might be making ‘white power’ hand gesture in photo,” tweeted CBS News.

Not a reporter or producer, mind you. The news organization itself.

D.C. Fire Department recruits might be making "white power" hand gesture in photo https://t.co/cSYPzwmUZ1 pic.twitter.com/3iw52wD9iB

— CBS News (@CBSNews) January 16, 2020

Clicking on the article explains more:

A photo of fire department recruits possibly using a racist hand gesture is being investigated by District of Columbia Fire and Emergency Medical Services. CBS Washington, D.C. affiliate WUSA-TV reports that the agency said it was made aware of the photo Wednesday.

The hand signal that they’re reporting as possibly being a “white power” symbol is essentially the “ok” hand gesture, but now it means “WP.” This was a narrative cooked up by the Anti-Defamation League, who put the image up in their “symbols of hate” guidebook.

But even the ADL says that when judging whether or not someone is using the ok symbol that “caution must be used in evaluating instances of this symbol’s use.”

But our media isn’t into caution in evaluation. They need to get you a shocking story and they need to get it to you right now.

With that in mind, they put up the tweet telling social media goers that a D.C. fire department is full of people who “might” be making a “white power” hand gesture. However, even CBS seems to know that it’s not a racist hand gesture because buried at the very bottom of the article, CBS kind of tells you that it’s not:

The investigation comes about a month after military officials said hand gestures flashed by West Point cadets and Naval Academy midshipmen during the televised Army-Navy football game weren’t racist signals. Officials said the students were participating in a “circle game” in which someone flashes an upside-down OK sign below the waist and punches anyone who looks at it.

It’s a game and CBS knew it was a game.

That didn’t stop them from tweeting out a phrase that put the idea in people’s heads that white supremacy was running rampant. It didn’t stop them from writing that an investigation into the potential racism was going on. They only allayed fears in the final paragraph where very few people venture nowadays.

They knew, and they pushed a narrative anyway.

Now the idea that racism is alive and well in our nation has been planted in the heads of anyone who comes across this tweet. This is how narratives are created. Subtle bits of quick information that is rarely looked into.

And don’t think this is an isolated incident.

MSNBC decided it would run Iran’s claim that it killed 30 Americans during it’s latest missile strike in the midst of the Pentagon saying it had killed none. While the reporter said that Iran’s claim was unconfirmed, he sure didn’t act like it, and didn’t mention the Pentagon’s information at all.

Iran claims it killed 30 Americans. The Pentagon said they killed no Americans.

MSNBC decided to run Iran’s narrative.

If you were wondering whose side the media is on, let that inform your opinion.

— Brandon Morse (@TheBrandonMorse) January 8, 2020

Why did it do that? Again. Narrative.

Dead Americans in Iraq right after Trump had killed an Iranian General would be excellent soil to plant anti-Trump sentiment in. The dead soldiers would be Trump’s fault according to the media narrative, and from that narrative, a whole host of opportunities to strike at Trump’s approval rating would follow, and just in time for 2020 no less. MSNBC knew exactly what it was doing.

Another example would be in April of 2019 when ABC News attempted to generate outrage around the movie “Us” by Jordan Peele. To recap, the movie featured an actress mimicking a vocal chord condition called “spasmatic dysphonia” in order to make the movie’s villain seem more terrifying.

To make a long story short, ABC took three tweets, two from users that hardly had any followers and one that had 3,500, each expressing a form of outrage over the actress using the disorder as an acting tool. ABC then featured the outrage on a story on Good Morning America and interviewed a doctor about it as well as Robert Kennedy, who suffers from the disease.

To read the entire story on ABC’s attempt to create a giant scandal out of scraps, click the link below.

(READ: ABC News Just Tried to Create a Raging Scandal Out of Nothing)

If the media is wondering why people are trusting it less and less, this is why. In the age of the internet, creating narratives and scandals is not the same kind of process it used to be. People on the internet can now go around news organizations to get their news, and can even prove deeper into the news that’s delivered to them