Originally Posted by narvik

We are getting our information from rather sloppy journalism, so I wouldn't want to assume that those words ("Nobody flies for free") were the FIRST thing the GA uttered. We have no way of telling what words were exchanged, and seem to automatically sympathize with the passenger. I'm not so sure that is appropriate, but alas, we simply don't know.

I've only read three articles on this case, and here's my scoring:
NYT: terrible journalism, seems to be original source. D-
NBCnews: decent. No overly emotional bias and negativity toward UA either: B+
Flyertalk (Jeff Edwards): even worse than NYT article, wow! Just regurgitating NYT article with no effort whatsoever: F (added: apparently the quote "Nobody flies for free" above the headline of this article has been removed since posting)