WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — It’s a commonplace by now to bemoan how broken U.S. politics is, but a good deal of the blame for that breakdown goes to our broken media.

Nothing has made this clearer than the mainstream media’s treatment of two presidential hopefuls who refuse to play by the rules of the game.

One is Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, who doesn’t put up with the “gotcha” journalism of false narratives and whose appeal to large crowds of enthusiastic voters is dismissed by the Beltway punditocracy as a temporary aberration.

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The other, of course, is Donald Trump, the billionaire real estate developer and reality TV star who tends to say what he thinks before he thinks.

But he also draws loud and enthusiastic crowds while his larger-than-life antics drive coverage of the other mealy-mouthed candidates off the newspaper pages and airwaves.

In the process, however, Sanders and Trump are pulling the last veils off how truly lame our political media have become. (Sarah Palin’s one lasting contribution to our political discourse was the term “lamestream media.”)

Take Sanders on Sunday’s “Meet the Press” with Chuck Todd. The onetime political analyst who has had mixed success as anchor tried to exploit Sanders’ presence in Louisiana in the wake of the shooting deaths there to talk about the candidate’s “pro-NRA” votes in Vermont and his straddling the line on gun-control issues.

Sanders abruptly interrupted him, tells him that’s not what he said, that he has voted in the Senate to ban most assault weapons, to implement instant background checks, and to close the gun-show loophole on gun sales. His main point is that Americans have to stop “screaming” at each other about guns and find common ground.

Then Todd moved on to talk about Sanders’ “confrontation” with Black Lives Matter protesters at a Netroots Nation meeting.

Again Sanders interrupted to challenge the word “confrontation,” explaining that his speech on immigration was disrupted by the protesters — whose message nonetheless he accepts as an important concern that he shares.

In fairness to Todd, Sanders does appear a bit cranky and ended up shouting over the protesters rather than engaging with them. Both at Netroots and Meet the Press, he pointed to his long record of civil-rights activism.

Trump is cut of completely different cloth than Sanders but his problems with media coverage is surprisingly similar.

Like Sanders, he is misquoted, quoted out of context, misrepresented in subsequent coverage and in general is subject to a negative bias based on the establishment view that he should not be taken seriously as a presidential candidate.

That is for voters to decide, not the press. Trump’s tendency to let his mouth run ahead of his brain doesn’t help, but reporters make precious little effort to keep his words in context as they look for the next outrageous headline.

Trump has defended himself against what he sees as two major misrepresentations — that he thinks most Mexican immigrants are rapists and murderers and that John McCain is not a war hero.

Trump was actually referring only to illegal immigrants and his point was that Mexico is happy to push some of its criminal population across the border to let U.S. authorities catch and jail them.

“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending the best,” he said in his campaign announcement speech. “They’re not sending you, they’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists and some, I assume, are good people, but I speak to border guards and they’re telling us what we’re getting.”

On the McCain controversy, Trump did indeed at first say “he was not a war hero” in an unfinished sentence. He went on subsequently to say five times McCain was a war hero, qualifying it by saying that resulted from his being captured — which he seems to think is less heroic than other forms of bravery.

Trump cited a conservative press watchdog, Sharyl Attkisson, who criticized coverage of the statement for ignoring Trump’s correcting himself and agreeing McCain was a hero, albeit with qualification.

But these qualifying remarks were enough for PolitiFact to label Trump’s defense “mostly false,” even though this self-appointed judge and jury at the Tampa Bay Times has a spotty track record.

The press uses other weapons against Trump and Sanders. They are routinely labeled “populist” in the assumption that everyone agrees with the establishment that this is a bad thing.

They reward the politicians who have learned to game the system of false equivalence by parroting whatever half-truth or lie they care to tell, without pointing out to readers the falsity of this statement.

The likeliest outcome of the primary contests is that we will have a general election pitting Hillary Clinton against Jeb Bush.

That dubious triumph of democracy will be due in no small part to media efforts to channel our political debate into the tried-and-true channels that have alienated so much of the population from the democratic process.