The camera pans cinematically across the Iowa debate stage as Elizabeth Warren slides past the row of podiums. Bernie Sanders makes a move to shake her hand, but her hands pull in toward her body as she can be heard saying, inflecting her voice as if it’s a question, “I think you called me a liar on national TV?”

“What?” Sanders responds, his once outstretched hand resting now again by his hip. Warren repeats herself before he says, “You know, let’s not do it right now. You want to have that discussion, we’ll have that discussion.”

“Anytime,” Warren replies as if it’s a challenge. This appears to strike a nerve with Sanders, who points back and forth between them and says brusquely, “You called me a liar, you told me —” He breaks off his sentence, instead saying, “All right, let’s not do it now.”

“I don’t want to get in the middle,” a hapless Tom Steyer interjects, “but I just wanted to say, ‘Hi, Bernie.’”

Turning to leave, Sanders says only, “Yeah, good, okay.”

I have watched this footage over and over, dissecting it in search of something, anything that can make it valuable information in this primary race. But ultimately, all I can see is what feels like the heavy hand of the cable news network that released the audio a day after exacerbating the apparent rift between Sanders and Warren live on stage at a debate they hosted, an event which itself came after a few days of social media users pouring gasoline on the fire. And what I see there isn’t “good, okay” — it’s the same kind of institutional failure that played out during the 2016 election.

CNN released the audio Wednesday, a day after the debate the network cohosted with local newspaper the Des Moines Register saw a moderator criticized for defying journalistic convention with a debate question about whether or not Sanders told Warren in 2018 that a woman couldn’t win the 2020 presidential election. Sanders reiterated on stage his denial of ever having said such a thing. Then the moderator asked Warren to respond with a question based on the idea that Sanders said exactly what he has repeatedly insisted he didn’t say.

As illustrated by the hot mic post-debate moment that feels tailor-made for the social media news cycle, neither 2020 contender seems likely to recant their version of the story. That leaves us with the question of what actually happened but, perhaps more importantly, a bigger question about what this all means. What this has really become a question of — and what I believe has so animated people across the progressive left — is not whether Sanders said a woman can’t win in 2020 or what he meant if he implied as much; it is about whether people think Sanders is a misogynist, a long-standing question and critique that has been leveled against the Vermont senator by some. In the process, I fear that the 2020 Democratic primary is shifting to become a referendum on gender politics, similar to what happened in 2016, when the contest between Sanders and Hillary Clinton helped fracture the left.

And media organizations, even those that often do great and important work, have aided that conversation shift, bending this campaign kerfuffle into something more akin to a behind-the-scenes extra from reality TV. I often call President Donald Trump’s tenure a reality-TV presidency. When I say that, I don’t mean to imply that Trump single-handedly shifted our media paradigm to one of vicious sound bites; I mean he exploited a media ecosystem that is eager to feed off of that exact kind of drama — because providing fodder for social media controversy seems to pay off.