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I had personally been bothered by the incident where Dean attacked a citizen speaker and told him to sit down, but I’d only seen Dean’s angry response — I did not know what he was responding to. Now I know. It turns out the man Dean was responding to was a Republican heckler and that the audience cheered when Dean told him to sit down and shut up. But all we saw on the newscasts was Dean yelling at the guy — both the context (the reason Dean was provoked) and the reaction (the cheering crowd) were omitted. That’s item 1. Item 2 comes from the same story, which points out that Clark did exactly the same thing, but that hasn’t been in the news media.

Can anyone conclude that the media’s treatment of identical situations constitutes fairness in reporting? Can anyone dispute that Dean is not getting a fair shake? Instead, the media fits every incident into the party-line story about the candidate (“Dean is angry”). Since “Clark is angry” is not their version of the Clark story, his anger goes unreported.

And lost in even my own analysis is the question of whether anger is justified or not. Anger is bad in the media shorthand, where they don’t really care about substance, just about appearances.

How can we ever take back our political system when there’s an operator in the middle of every transaction with an agenda who has no accountability or standards, except to promote themselves?