The Democratic National Convention gaveled into session Monday engulfed in a toxic fog of bad news and worse media incentives that threatened to stagger what was meant to be a well-planned and festive event.

Donald Trump’s real, sizable convention bounce, and the release by Wikileaks of hacked DNC emails that outraged Bernie Sanders supporters and forced chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz to resign, provided a backdrop against which the chattering classes could draw an equivalence between Hillary Clinton’s opening night and the GOP’s bloody-shirt-waving kickoff a week ago.

The intra-Democratic repercussions were sizable enough to relegate to second-tier news status the fact that federal law enforcement officials believe Wikileaks obtained the emails from Russian security service hackers in order to bolster Trump’s candidacy.

For the first hour or two, pockets of Sanders delegates booed or heckled speakers, raising the unfathomable specter that headliners would be prevented from delivering their remarks uninterrupted. The storyline was tempting enough that media critics speculated cable networks were manipulating their audio pickups to make the booing sound louder on television than it did in the convention hall.

But by the end of the evening, the disarray story became impossible to credit. Reporting from inside the convention hall corrected the solidifying narrative of a party in shambles; and the basic competence, and occasional brilliance, of the stagecraft left no room for anyone other than the most partisan operatives to pretend the two conventions and parties are equally broken.