How Media Kool Kids Try to Bar Access to Your Government, Or...

In Montana, anyone can walk into the state Capitol and sit in on any meeting, press conference or other gathering, thanks to our state's Open Meeting Law. You literally can sit in on everything. You want to watch the Democratic Senate caucus meeting? Go right ahead. You want to take notes on the Republican House caucus meeting? Totally fine. It is the ultimate in transparent democracy: anyone - reporter, citizen, activist, anyone - can see their government at work. The same cannot be said of the U.S. Capitol - and not because of any security concerns, but because there are certain people who have a very vested interest in preventing the public from seeing what's going on.

This is the underlying subject of a very snarky, highly irresponsible, yet laugh-out-loud funny article on the Washington Post's website that features yours truly. As Mary Ann Akers breathlessly "reports" in the first paragraph, after a committee of journalists denied me a temporary press credential for an article I was working on for the award-winning, 35-year-old magazine In These Times (which I am a senior editor at), I supposedly devised an ultra-devious, almost criminal plot to infiltrate the U.S. Capitol and - gasp! - interview senators like other reporters do. How did I do this? I got an intern pass from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who I was shadowing for the day as part of my article.