There is a whole lot of fail here:

“Scott – You have our sincere apologies for the lack of a better hold room today,” wrote Vice President Biden spokeswoman Elizabeth Alexander last Wednesday to Orlando Sentinel reporter Scott Powers. “Lack of a better hold room” is an interesting way of putting it. In order to keep Powers from mingling with guests at a Democratic fundraiser last Wednesday, Powers was escorted into a storage closet by a Biden staffer. Powers was the designated pool reporter, there to record the proceedings for the press corps in general. He told ABC News that he showed up at 11:15 a.m. Wednesday to cover Vice President Biden and Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., attending a $500-a-head fundraiser at the Winter Park manse of developer Alan Ginsburg. A young female staffer met him at the door and brought him to the storage closet. “You’re going to have to wait in here until the VP gets here,” he says she told him. “You’re kidding me,” he recalls responding.

I have absolutely NO idea what the Biden team was thinking. I saw a picture of the mansion, and I know there has to be at least one room that he could have been in other than a storage closet. This is just disastrous work from Biden’s staff, and you can expect a lot of catty pieces from the Beltway boys about this.

But the bigger question to me is why does the press allow itself to be locked in a holding room in the first place? What kid of reporting is that? What self-respecting “reporter” would agree to those terms? It’s absurd. You’re a reporter, not a stenographer, you should have full access or refuse to cover it. If they just want you to print about Biden’s speech, tell them to send you a copy via email, that you have better things to do. And then savage them in the press until they realize not giving you access is worse than giving you unrestricted access. Hell, the media in Libya have better access.

Powers says the situation was never “rectified.” Any time he stuck his head out he’d been shooed back inside. He said he was held for more than an hour in the closet, was allowed out for 35 minutes of remarks by Biden and Nelson, after which it was back into the closet until the VP left.

The proper response to being “shooed back inside” a closet buy some staffer is to tell them to go fuck themselves, walk out with your head up, and then proceed to make their lives miserable in your paper. Not to whine about it after accepting the treatment. They have to be hiding something, right? Otherwise why do they want you in a holding room? And why do you call yourself a reporter and let them treat you that way?