Let’s start with the moment that brought the house down:

“That plays pretty well in this room,” Anderson Cooper sputtered, as the crowd rose to its feet, and he only managed to bail himself out by throwing the ball to Lincoln Chafee, who was happy to spare Cooper further embarrassment by sabotaging himself. The former Republican was still a few minutes away from destroying his own by campaign by admitting that he voted in favor of repealing Glass-Steagall because he failed to read the legislation, but he gave us an indication of the disaster to come by ignoring a room full of raucous Democrats and taking Clinton to ask. The emails mattered! And did she wish to respond, Cooper wondered?

“No.”

That single word said so much that it earned Clinton the second-biggest reaction of the night, after the outburst for Sanders a moment earlier.

I bring this up because I think it’s important to analyze why the people in the audience, and many of us watching from home (or the press filing room, in my case), felt so inspired by the giant “fuck off” proffered by the two leading Democratic candidates. Part of it is that we know a Republican witch hunt when we see one—years of bullshit, including an impeachment, have taught us to notice the warning signs.

In a larger sense, though, this wasn’t about partisan politics. It was about the media, and how people like Anderson Cooper and the channel he represents buy into these non-stories hook, line, and sinker. They’ve constructed a lucrative industry by churning up superficial pablum, weaving it into something resembling an actual story, and hammering it into a viewing audience until none of us can see straight. The end result is not that anyone actually cares about Clinton’s e-mail, beyond a few partisan hacks—it’s that we become disenchanted with politics, and tune out. When you search for the reason why 63 percent of our population didn’t vote in the last midterm, television media belongs in the rogue’s gallery of suspects, along with an obstructionist Congress and the big money that corrupts our political system.

Sanders wasn’t chastising the Republicans in his answer; he was chastising the media. Even if ordinary viewers can’t always articulate it, we understand that there are layers of obfuscation draped between ourselves and The Thing That Really Matters, and we know that this shadowland is created and maintained by a superficial corporate press. It’s why, instead of hearing about wealth inequality or climate change when we turn on CNN or MSNBC or CNBC or Fox News, we hear about e-mail scandals, and Donald Trump’s hat, and Benghazi, and the aspects of horse-race politics that leave the issues totally untouched. It is a huge reason why we’re an uninformed populace that doesn’t vote.

But while we may be a politically ignorant society at the current historical moment, we’re not stupid, and when someone has the balls to stand up and speak through the fog of sensationalism, we see the artifice laid bare. Sanders gave us one of those rare clarion calls when they asked him about the emails, and for a moment, we all felt liberated from the bullshit. You saw it in the genuine smile on Clinton’s face, and the roaring of the crowd—we’re not quite sure how to get here permanently, but this is, without a doubt, where it’s at.

But the bullshit was piled so deep. Over and over, the moderators tried to lead the candidates through trap doors, or lectured them, or shouted over them like angry school marms. Certain exchanges stick out, as when Juan Carlos Lopez questioned Sanders on his immigration vote:

JUAN CARLOS LOPEZ, CNN EN ESPANOL ANCHOR: Gracias, Anderson. Senator Sanders, in 2013, you voted for immigration reform. But in 2007, when Democrats controlled Congress and the Bush White House was onboard, you voted against it. Why should Latino voters trust you now when you left them at the altar at the moment when reform was very close?

SANDERS: I didn’t leave anybody at the altar. I voted against that piece of legislation because it had guest-worker provisions in it which the Southern Poverty Law Center talked about being semi-slavery. Guest workers are coming in, they’re working under terrible conditions, but if they stand up for their rights, they’re thrown out of the country. I was not the only progressive to vote against that legislation for that reason. Tom Harkin, a very good friend of Hillary Clinton’s and mine, one of the leading labor advocates, also voted against that.

LOPEZ: Tom Harkin isn’t running for president. You are.

SANDERS: I know that. But point being is that progressives did vote against that for that reason. My view right now — and always has been — is that when you have 11 million undocumented people in this country, we need comprehensive immigration reform, we need a path toward citizenship, we need to take people out of the shadows.

There’s so much to unpack age here, starting with the way Lopez asked his initial question. Instead of wondering why a lifelong progressive might have voted against positive reform, and giving him a chance to explain, he took a confrontational stance and closed his question with an insult. It was the same tactic Anderson Cooper employed right from the start, when he bluntly asked Clinton, “will you say anything to get elected?”

There’s a temptation to applaud these “no-nonsense” approaches, but in fact, there’s a difference between aggressive questioning and the sort of bullying tone that lowers the level of discourse and transforms the whole debate into a combative sideshow.

Sanders offered his explanation, and by way of justifying his vote, he mentioned that other progressives had objected for similar reasons. That earned him this response:

“Tom Harkin isn’t running for president. You are.”

Beyond being completely unfair—Sanders had every right to back up his claim by referring to progressive allies, and it wasn’t like he was using Harkin as a crutch—Lopez’s retort was actually very telling. It showed the poisonous mindset operating beneath the surface, not just for him but for the entire CNN team. They weren’t interested in anything but drama, and if it took dishonest rhetorical tricks to stimulate that drama, they were only too willing to jump in the gutter.

Take, for instance, this exchange between Dana Bash and Clinton:

CLINTON: I see my good friend, Senator Gillibrand, in the front row. She’s been a champion of this [paid family leave]. We need to get a consensus through this campaign, which is why I’m talking about it everywhere I go, and we need to join the rest of the advanced world in having it.

BASH: But Secretary — Secretary Clinton, even many people who agree with you might say, look, this is very hard to do, especially in today’s day and age. There are so many people who say, “Really? Another government program? Is that what you’re proposing? And at the expense of taxpayer money?”

It’s unfortunate that the words on paper don’t quite convey Bash’s tone, which was equal parts shocked, concerned, admonishing, and condescending. If you didn’t know much about politics, or weren’t paying close attention, you might have thought that Clinton suggested something truly radical, like dropping live horses on ISIS or using social security money to build ten thousand riverboat prisons.

But here was Bash’s actual problem: A political candidate was supporting a federal program that would be funded by tax dollars.

Read that again, because it is the very fucking foundation of our government, and most governments across the world. That’s how governments work. They tax their citizens, and those taxes pay for things like roads and hospitals and schools. For Bash to react with horror at this notion betrays a stunning, embarrassing level of ignorance—or at least the kind of fundamental dishonesty designed to score cheap points from a television audience.

So, is Dana Bash stupid, or just sinister? It’s one or the other, and I very much doubt that she’s stupid.

The list goes on and on. When Cooper tossed it to the impressively useless Don Lemon, czar of the unwashed Facebook masses, they chose this one from among thousands from a law school student named Arthur Wilkins:

WILKINS: My question for the candidates is, do black lives matter, or do all lives matter?

Before we parse the land mines behind this question, let’s quickly think of three better ways that we could ask the same thing:

1. What’s your racial justice platform?

2. Do you think police in this country are fundamentally racist against black citizens?

3. It’s a goddam outrage that black victims continue to mount due to police violence. What do you plan to do about it?

I’m sure some version of that question was available to CNN, but it’s no mistake that they chose to play a game of semantics with Arthur Wilkins’ entry. His was a question with no good answer—say “all lives matter,” and you’re trivializing a righteous movement and ignoring a serious problem. Say “black lives matter,” and you’ve stumbled into a strange rhetorical netherworld where you’re discounting other lives, especially to those unfamiliar with the #BLM movement.

It’s a bizarre false dichotomy designed to produce a BAD BAD ANSWER, and Sanders responded by essentially answering one of the questions I posed above, which was the only correct way to proceed.

Indulge me with one last example. The following question is apparently what passes for foreign policy debate at CNN:

COOPER: Senator Sanders, tell an American soldier who is watching right now tonight in Afghanistan why you can be commander-in- chief given that you applied for conscientious objector status.

Sanders responded with one of the most eloquent defenses of the night, and it was a net positive for him, but I can’t help feel repulsed at the phrasing of Cooper’s question. The quagmire that was Vietnam has only come to look worse and worse for America in the intervening years, and Sanders’ objections, just like his objections to the Iraq War, are now shared by the majority of Americans. Whatever your politics, there’s a great argument to be made that Sanders was ahead of his time on these two similar issues, and that his conscientious objection actually makes him more capable of leading the U.S. military, since he won’t throw them into unnecessary wars like some of the hawks currently in Congress.

That possibility was nearly lost in Cooper’s question, which, by implication, painted Sanders as a peacenik sissy who is probably taunted and/or burned in effigy by the manly men of the U.S. Army as they bravely defend the nation in Afghanistan.

I know I’m sounding like a broken record at this point, but I have to say it again: There’s an unpleasant black-and-white thought process operating just beneath the surface, as though extreme, polarized belief systems are somehow more legitimate because they’re so damn decisive. It reinforces the lesser angels of our American nature—the ones that eschew subtlety, and tacitly endorse a might-makes-right fantasy at the expense of creativity and sincerity and nuance. At is heart, this is nothing but anti-intellectualism, and Cooper’s solemn gravitas disguises a real danger—this is not who we should become.

The CNN style of questioning, which occurred over and over and over again, is hugely unproductive, and treats the viewing audience like a bunch of idiotic rubes who couldn’t understand matters of substance, but who would cheer like primitives every time they saw spilled blood.

It was depressing to realize what they thought of us, but it was heartening to see the cheers for Sanders and Clinton when they rejected the email questions—deep down, at least in our aspirations, that’s not who we want to be.

None of this is new, and none of this should have surprised me. In yesterday’s live blog, I saw this coming an hour before the debate even began:

CNN’s debate coverage is fairly disgusting up and down the line. It’s like someone once accused them of sensationalizing political coverage, and they were like, “sensational? I’ll show you sensational!” And then just dedicated themselves to making everything as superficial as possible.

The worst part is their “Elections USA” Facebook zone, which contains about 50 vapid millennials hovering around video screens to monitor exactly what every idiot with a Facebook account is saying at every second. They’ll blather on about the importance of social media and etc., but what it boils down to, philosophically, is a shitty motto: The issues don’t matter, but the reactions do. No matter who’s reacting.

Believing that perception is reality is one thing, but actively trying to erase reality is going a bit far. From the social media obsession to the endless “spinning” by pundits who don’t belong on television, to reducing every candidate to a label (Bernie is socialist! Hillary is dishonest!), it’s just endless blather with almost literally no substance.

The problem is, networks like CNN have a lot of influence in these situations, and the campaigns have to buy in, at least to some extent.

When the debate was over, I migrated with the rest of the reporters to the “spin room,” where I watched assistants hold up signs indicating the name and affiliation of each adviser, manager, and political ally assigned to spread the good word for their chosen candidate. The very existence of this room is insane on its face, but more insane is that we take it seriously, gathering quotes from one corner to the next, all of which say the exact same thing and have the same amount of credibility—that is to say, zero. It’s a glorified propaganda den, the very name of which implies deceit, and yet this is where we turn for reactions. It’s mind-boggling.

(It’s also semi-frightening on a purely physical level, as Andrea Mitchell found out when she had to be rescued by Sanders.)

The corrupt media system builds on itself, and at this point they’ve constructed a thriving empire of lies. Considering that, the location was perfect—what better place to showcase sensationalism, superficiality, and the dull existential dread that comes from destructive nourishments, than a Las Vegas casino?

Despite the garish display, and against all odds, moments of substance shone through. On the negative side, we learned that Lincoln Chafee doesn’t read Senate bills and that Jim Webb really doesn’t like waiting his turn (and also that he’s pretty proud of killing a guy). On the positive side, we saw Martin O’Malley prove that he deserved a spot with the big dogs, and we saw Bernie Sanders rail passionately against wealth inequality in a way that’s galvanized a disenchanted progressive left. And even though I consider Hillary Clinton a dishonest opportunist and a secret Republican hiding behind a handful of liberal social views, I can admit that she looked presidential and came off the most prepared and polished of any candidate.

When CNN permitted, the three had a vibrant debate on the issues. If it occasionally became antagonistic, it was antagonistic in a good way. O’Malley and Clinton teamed up to kill Sanders on guns, and Sanders and O’Malley returned the favor against Clinton on Glass-Steagall. They knew each other’s strengths, and they pounced on each other’s weaknesses, and that’s how a debate should work.

Those moments resonated, and left me to wonder how it might have gone if the CNN flunkeys had stayed at home, acting out their anti-intellectual agendas and overweening egomania alone, in front of full-length mirrors instead of TV cameras. Can you imagine what inspiring ideas might have come through our TV sets?

Wherever you’re reading this, pour one out for the brilliant exchanges we didn’t hear, deep in the bowels of Sin City.