Phrases and words have fads and fashions just like anything else. Before I Googled, I was able to figure out what the phrase meant, but I didn't know that an Australian politician used it in 2010, and evidently people thought it was cool and started to copy it. ""Confected outrage" has been erupting from news pages, mostly in Australia, in the past month; 65 times in January compared with four times a month two years ago." A "confection" is candy, or sugar frosting. A "confectioner" is a candy-maker. As a verb "to confect" is rare--not sure I've ever heard it used before--but it means to combine ingredients to make candy... ...hey, I just checked a dictionary and learned something... it can also mean simply "To put together by combining materials: a group of writers who confected a television series." Here, it means artificially manufactured outrage. It means that someone is pretending to be much more outraged than they really are. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/archive/media/confected-outrage/story-fna132ag-1226574895800

Here's a hypothetical example of confected outrage. Suppose politician A wishes to attack politician B. Politician B parks in a no-parking zone and gets ticketed. Politician A gives a speech saying "Now, you may say this is not important, but it speaks to the issue of character. Character, my friends, character. Character is everything. We are a nation of laws, not of men, and what does it say when politician B arrogantly thumbs his nose at the law of the land? I would call your attention to the fact that politician B's office at first denied the report. The issue is not just the crime, but the cover-up. Politician B's office lied to the people, lied to you and lied to me, and I ask you: what will he do in office? Will he continue this persistent pattern of unending scandals, lies, and cover-ups?" This is confected outrage. Politician doesn't actually care about politician B getting a traffic ticket, but by pretending to be outraged he hope he can arouse real outrage in the voters.