On September 30, the Mirror broke the story.

Islamic State monsters are plotting to unleash a nuclear holocaust, killing millions of innocent people in "the largest religious cleansing in history", an insider has claimed.

End Times. WWIII. Armageddon, but without Bruce Willis. It doesn't get scarier than this.
All red-blooded Americans are obligated to wet yourselves while cowering under your beds, sobbing pitifully, and praying to whatever diety you think can help you right now.

And then, as if from a Hollywood movie, the heroic FBI saved us just days later.

‘Annihilate America’: Inside a Secret, Frightening Scheme to Sell Nuclear Material to ISIS
—Salon ( 10/7/15)

AP: Smugglers Busted Trying to Sell Nuclear Material to ISIS
—CBS News ( 10/7/15)

FBI Foils Smugglers’ Plot to Sell Nuclear Material to ISIS
—The Independent ( 10/7/15)

We've been saved! Jack Bauer stopped the evil terrorists.
You can now stop sobbing.

However, I should mention that there was only one little, tiny, microscopic problem with this story.

It was all COMPLETE AND TOTAL BULLSHIT!

Well, not total bullshit. Actually, everything about this story was true except for one critical element - there were no terrorists involved.

At no point do the multiple iterations of the AP‘s reporting show that anyone involved in the FBI sting were members of or have any connection to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (aka ISIL or Daesh). While one of several smuggling attempts discussed in AP‘s reporting involved an actual potential buyer–an otherwise unknown Sudanese doctor who four years ago “suggested that he was interested” in obtaining uranium–the “terrorists” otherwise involved in the cases were FBI and other law enforcement agents posing as such. According to the AP and NBC’s Pete Williams:

However, the official emphasized that there was no known ISIS connection. An undercover informant, working with Moldovan police, claimed that he was an ISIS representative.
“But that was totally made up,” the official said.

So yeh. The story is a bit less scary when you subtract the terrorists from the plot.
That fact didn't stop International Business Times’ Christopher Harress from going all Jason Bourne with the story.

Members of the Islamic State group with links to Russian gangs were trying to get hold of nuclear material to build a radioactive dirty bomb before Moldovan police and FBI operatives stopped them, according to an investigation reported Wednesday by the Associated Press. The terror group, which is also known as ISIS, had been approached by gangs in Moldova that were specifically seeking a buyer from ISIS.

There is nothing about this article that is true, and we could go into the fact that the news media doesn't seem to think that accuracy is important when the issue is terrorism, but we don't have all night.
Well, we do have time for one other example. Remember how we all almost died on July 4th?

Former CIA deputy director Mike Morell ominously told CBS last week that “I wouldn’t be surprised if we weren’t sitting here a week from today talking about an attack over the weekend in the United States.” MSNBC and Fox joined in too, using graphics and maps right out of Stephen Colbert’s satirical “Doom Bunker,” suggesting World War III was just on the verge of reaching America’s shores.

There were plenty of Serious People in the government to explain why this July 4th was going to be the most dangerous in the history of the country.

Authorities told NBC News that they are unaware of any specific or credible threat inside the country. But the dangers are more complex and unpredictable than ever.

You read that right. There were no "specific or credible threats" but that just made things more dangerous than ever.
If there was a specific and credible threat then we'd actually be in less danger.

Oh sure, you are in more danger of dying from “autoerotic asphyxiation” than by terrorist attack, and white supremists kill more Americans than Islamic terrorists, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't be paralyzed with fear of scary muslims.
If you want proof, just look at the ISIS dildo-flag. Our children need to be protected from that.

The Other Side of the Coin

Of course this story isn't just about the news media wrecklessly and needlessly hyping fear. There is another side of this story that is even more important - the government wrecklessly and needlessly hyping that fear.

Adam Johnson went back and looked at the last 40 times that the FBI and Homeland Security have issued similar threats around national holidays and found that we barely escaped with our lives each and every time. Somehow the terrorists failed to carry out a single one of those terrorist attacks.

“Can the FBI break its terror-predicting 0-40 losing streak this weekend? Tune into CNN to find out!”
- Journalist Adam Johnson

This is a very big problem. How is the FBI and Homeland Security going to justify their enormous budgets if they can't arrest non-existent terrorists?
Fortunately, there is a very simple solution - just create a threat.

In the absence of real terror attacks in the U.S., it’s difficult to keep the stupid serfs shivering in a corner in the fetal position. Enter fake terrorist attacks; funded, created and planned by the FBI.

The current government practice of manufacturing terrorism can be summed up by this quote by Petra Bartosiewicz in The Nation:

Nearly every major post-9/11 terrorism-related prosecution has involved a sting operation, at the center of which is a government informant. In these cases, the informants — who work for money or are seeking leniency on criminal charges of their own — have crossed the line from merely observing potential criminal behavior to encouraging and assisting people to participate in plots that are largely scripted by the FBI itself. Under the FBI’s guiding hand, the informants provide the weapons, suggest the targets and even initiate the inflammatory political rhetoric that later elevates the charges to the level of terrorism.

Not exactly Jack Bauer-level of counter-terrorism.
Time after time the FBI has paid informants large amounts of cash to help "disrupt a terror plot".
They then find a target and they give him the detailed plans for the attack and money to carry it out. Sometimes the target refuses to go along with the plot and the FBI has to conjole him into it.

In the case of the impoverished James Cromitie, the target refused to go along with the FBI-sponsored plot of eight months. Only after the FBI agreed to pay him $250,000 did he finally agree. He was sentenced to 25 years.
Judge McMahon wrote an increadible indictment of the government that you should read:

As it turns out, the Government did absolutely everything that the defense predicted in its previous motion to dismiss the indictment. The Government indisputably “manufactured” the crimes of which defendants stand convicted. The Government invented all of the details of the scheme - many of them, such as the trip to Connecticut and the inclusion of Stewart AFB as a target, for specific legal purposes of which the defendants could not possibly have been aware (the former gave rise to federal jurisdiction and the latter mandated a twenty-five year minimum sentence). The Government selected the targets. The Government designed and built the phony ordnance that the defendants planted (or planned to plant) at Government-selected targets. The Government provided every item used in the plot: cameras, cell phones, cars, maps and even a gun. The Government did all the driving (as none of the defendants had a car or a driver’s license). The Government funded the entire project. And the Government, through its agent, offered the defendants large sums of money, contingent on their participation in the heinous scheme...
“There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that James Cromitie could never have dreamed up the scenario in which he actually became involved. And if by some chance he had, he would not have had the slightest idea how to make it happen.”

These aren't isolated incidents.
Techdirt, has noticed that these FBI self-created terrorist plots happen over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over.

This is only the tip of the iceberg.
Not only are the terrorists manufactured by the FBI in order to get those attention-grabbing news headlines, the actual cases are often paper-thin.

FBI arrests of “terror suspects” on extremely flimsy pretexts, with charges stemming almost entirely from allegations by “informants” and the provision, by the FBI, of fake weapons to the suspects, have become something of a running joke. Attempts to prosecute these people are often extremely difficult, as the allegations are vague, and the evidence to support them is usually non-existent. Cases collapse, and the FBI has to roll the dice by charging them with something else, hoping something eventually sticks....
One top official rejected the idea that not being able to prosecute detainees for lack of evidence was a problem, saying that’s “the price you have to pay to prevent violence.” The arrest first and ask questions later strategy is drawing some criticism for being an inefficient way to gather intelligence.

Terrorists, real ones, are motivated to exaggerate their terrorist acts in order to gain volunteers and drum up funding.
So does the government. FBI agents and CIA intelligence officials, a top constitutional and military law expert, Time magazine, the Washington Post and others, have all said that the government was "“trying to create an atmosphere of fear in which the American people would give them more power”.
The former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge admitted that he raised the terror alert to help Bush win reelection. Former U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski told the Senate that war on terror is a “a mythical historical narrative”.