stir things up

Mr. Bensky, who called himself an activist-journalist, brought leftist views to reporting — often on people and issues under-covered by other news outlets — which he hoped would, as he often put it, “stir things up.”

Journalists love to stir things up like that.

A week after presenting the “animal hoax,” atop a chyron reading “The Media Is Trying to Stir Things Up,” Watters was smirking about another topic.

“The media knows which way the wind’s blowing, so they’re trying to stir things up. The George Floyd death and the riots that followed energized the base and kept the Black vote in the Democrat column,” Watters said.

Those traits tend to stir things up inside both the U.S.