So the NDP government has caved in and will now let reporters from The Rebel (former Sun News host Ezra Levant’s online news and opinion site) into news conferences and media “lock-ups.”

Whoopty doo! That hardly settles the matter of the NDP attack on free speech.

On Tuesday, it was revealed that Premier Rachel Notley’s staff had banned Rebel reporters from attending government briefings and news conferences, even ones held in the rotunda at the Alberta Legislature, the most public of public buildings.

On Wednesday, Notley’s communications director, Cheryl Oates, announced “We’ve heard a lot of feedback from Albertans and media … and it’s clear we made a mistake.”

No kidding they’d had an earful.

The subject of the ban trended Tuesday on both Twitter and Facebook. Scores of journalists, many of them friendly to the government, took the NDP to task for thinking it had the authority to choose which outlets could and couldn’t cover the government. Even Toronto’s Globe and Mail chose to wade in on matters in far-off Alberta with an editorial declaring “Why the Premier of Alberta shouldn’t get to decide who is ‘media.’ ”

But the important words in Oates’ statement are not “we made a mistake,” they’re “we’ve heard a lot of feedback.” Without the feedback, Notley’s government wouldn’t recognize even now just how wrong it was or how offside it was with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms — and that’s the troubling part.

Their own instincts told them there was nothing wrong with politicians getting to pick and choose who can report on their actions.

Just hours before Oates issued the New Dems’ mea culpa and announced the Dippers had hired respected journalist Heather Boyd, the Canadian Press’s former Western Canada bureau chief, to review their media policies, Oates was still insisting to my colleague Rick Bell that the government was fully justified in banning Rebel reporters.

“You have to draw the line somewhere,” Oates argued. “The Rebel isn’t accountable to anyone. They can say whatever they want without repercussion.”

That’s not true, of course. Like all outlets, The Rebel is accountable to its readers/viewers/listeners/sponsors. And it is governed by libel law, too.

The implication that The Rebel or any other media outlet has to be accountable to some authority, like a government agency, is both dangerous and clueless.

There is no central authority for accrediting media and there must never be. The only accreditation I have ever had as a journalist is a photo ID provided by my employer. Levant’s reporters had such credentials.

We must never get to the point where government has anything to do with reporter credentialing, otherwise there will always be the temptation for politicians to deny accreditation to journalists they dislike – the way the NDP tried to deny The Rebel.

And make no mistake, the NDP were singling out Levant and The Rebel, and still would be if they hadn’t been caught.

In trying to justify the government’s actions, Oates referred several outlets to a 2014 defamation hearing in Ontario in which Levant had testified “I’m a commentator. I’m a pundit. I don’t think in my entire life I’ve ever called myself a reporter.”

You can just imagine Notley and her staff exclaiming, “Aha! Now we’ve got him!”

But Levant never said he wasn’t a journalist, only that he wasn’t a reporter. Not the same thing.

The NDP were clearly looking for any excuse to bar Levant and his reporters. How many other journalists’ backgrounds and court testimonies have they dug into?

I suspect that when Heather Boyd submits her report in a few weeks she will recommend no government involvement in media credentialing. But that is not the natural instinct of this government.