Someone from the Maryland National Guard was in front of cameras this morning emphasizing that their presence was not under a declaration of martial law (which is a perhaps pedantic interpretation of "activate military powers", but there you go).

The situation in Baltimore (a city of 600,000, a metro of several million) looks to me like it is limited to at most a few thousand people. The idea that the media fanned these people into action is silly. They see large crowds of people (that are not rioting or looting) engaging with the police and see it as an opportunity to do whatever they want while hiding in those crowds.

The most common type of small riots in the US are sports related, those riots are certainly not the result of the media fanning flames, they are a result of small numbers of people feeling like they can hide in a crowd.

Baltimore is a city that has extreme poverty, very poor social services, and a tax structure (city/county border) that prevents regional economic growth from benefiting the poorest residents.

As a result, there are a lot of opportunistic criminals. The protests just tied up enough of the police force to create an opportunity.