This is a good example of one of the uglier incentives in political media.

I’m not saying Stephen Miller is reasonable here, or that his politics deserve some soft-focus sympathetic framing. The quotes are plenty extreme on their own. But that’s kind of the point: if the facts are bad enough, just tell me the facts.

Instead we get the usual headline-maximizing language: “meltdown,” “unhinged,” “bonkers,” etc. It’s written less like information and more like bait for people who already hate the guy to click, dunk, and share. That’s the same machinery that twists stories in every direction: find the most emotionally flammable wording, strip away nuance, and make the reader feel like something more dramatic happened than what the article actually shows.

This is why people distrust media even when the underlying story is real. The reporting may be about an actual ugly rant, but the packaging trains everyone to react to the spin first and the facts second.

“If it bleeds, it leads” has basically become “if it enrages, it engages.”