The 2004 election coverage left no such outs for Howard Dean and John Kerry. Dean was left with- "I'm not crazy... really, I'm not." Kerry was left with accusations that he was too slow to respond to the question of, "When did you stop beating your Swift Boat?"

Most people are under the impression that Howard Dean's campaign was sunk by the "Dean Scream" in Iowa. That, by itself, ignores the forces behind the altering of a non-event into a monumental meltdown.

According to the National Journal's Hotline, cable and network news aired "the scream" 633 times in the 4 days after it was made. This count did not include local news affiliates or talk shows.

ABC's Diane Sawyer reported on the ramifications as well as the reactions from some who were behind the scenes at cable and the networks.

She stated that it sounded very different in the actual room. The difference was because Dean was holding a handheld microphone that filtered out background noise and isolated his voice. She collected other tapes from that night that had crowd noise on them. She concluded that the "so-called scream couldn't really be heard at all." She also collected some sound bites from top executives at CBS News, ABC News, Fox News and CNN, all of whom acknowledged that the media overplayed the scream.

To understand why Dean took this beating (in January, 2004), one should refer to an interview Dean did with Chris Mathews on Hardball in the previous month.

The following are Dean quotes from the interview:

"What I'm going to do is appoint people to the FCC that believe democracy depends on getting information from all portions of the political spectrum, not just one... Yes, we're going to break up giant media enterprises... You have got to say that there has to be a limit as to how-- if the state has an interest, which it does, in preserving democracy, then there has to be a limitation on how deeply the media companies can penetrate every single community. To the extent of even having two or three or four outlets in a single community, that kind of information control is not compatible with democracy."

Lastly, if the 633 replays of a misleading tape proved insufficient to derail the Dean threat to continued consolidation, the Center for Media and Public Affairs reported that only 39 percent of Dean's coverage on the network evening news was positive during the week after Iowa. By contrast, rival John Edwards' coverage was 86 percent positive during the same period, and John Kerry's was 71 percent positive.