This is typical of the media coverage. "At a park in Berkeley, across the bay from San Francisco, protesters from both sides struck one another over the head with wooden sticks."
This equivalence is also typically false and dishonest.
When you hold a rally and violence results because other people came and attacked you, there's no equivalence in what happened. The same would be true if anti-war protesters held a rally and people showed up and began attacking them.
If the protesting group isn't going out and attacking people elsewhere, if the attackers come to them, then it's a straightforward case of self-defense.
What happened in Berkeley, as at previous Trump rallies, was assault. The SF Gate write-up, a source as unfriendly to Trump as can be imagined, makes that very clear.
The fighting Saturday started even before the event began, with people throwing punches, swinging signs and tossing smoke bombs. Hundreds of people filled the park, with anarchists and counterdemonstrators far outnumbering what rally sponsors estimated were 60 to 75 Trump supporters.
By 3 p.m., the self-proclaimed anarchists were dominating the crowd. Dressed all in black and wearing cloth bandannas over their faces, they stopped traffic as they marched from the park through downtown with the smaller mix of Trump supporters and counterprotesters. In the park, people opposed to Trump threw eggs and burned both American flags and the red “Make America Great Again” Trump campaign hats.
As a narrative of events, it's painfully clear. The mainstream media has chosen to distort events. As it has distorted all else.