Decades ago a marketing professor told a company that he’d developed a formulae that said for x amount of advertising money you got y amount of sales regardless of the product. He said that to test the theory he’d sell rocks. Google Pet Rock. It was a success and the results exactly followed his formulae.
I think the same is true of outrage. It doesn’t matter how ridiculous it is. Suppose a company, any company, runs out of toilet paper in the women’s bathroom. With sufficient x “advertising” (news coverage) they’d probably be driven out of business or at least forced to put out large sums of money.
Outrage is a function of coverage. One comment from the president along the lines of, “of course the police acted stupidly,” or, “he could have been my son,” is worth all the x you’d otherwise have to invest.
As far as the media goes it’s another name for propaganda. They use emotions to sell their point of view.
Advertising is only worth whoever is willing to believe in it. Though for evil, getting a president to buy into increasingly ginned up outrage stories, and announcing it all over the place, was a masterstroke. It was a perversion of the biblical concept (found in Romans 13) that officials of government have a rightful role in praising what is good.