Basically by focusing attention to issues you want people to care about and covering them in greater detail (accurate or inaccurate), the added focus elevates the issue in the viewer’s mind.

In some sense it’s mind control. Once you’ve captured someone’s attention, you can direct it and frame issues in such a way that convince you of a thing that was not important in the first place. Politics is a prime example where you can observe this - pitting people against one another on some mostly irrelevant issue when a larger issue goes unnoticed.

I’d say most media behaves this way, even those that seem reasonable and honest on the surface. Twitter and other social media just amplify this form of manipulation.