It all started Sunday night (April 1) when I learned that, according to the established custom of Al Gore's public appearances, all reporters from all media would be forbidden to enter the San Jose Civic Auditorium for the duration of the speech.

Understandably, I was perturbed, although I sympathized with Gore's feelings. The guy, I know, has every reason to be permanently outraged not only at the "judicial coup d'etat"—in the words of David Remnick—that denied him the White House in 2000, but also over his unprofessional treatment by many in the mainstream media.

Nonetheless, I decided that the story I would cover here would be Al Gore's war on the press. The next day, I went to the convention center, obtained a press pass and received an "Important Note for Media" that read: "Please note per Mr. Gore's request, all press are prohibited from attending his keynote address."

I carried this note upstairs to Linda Uslaner, a fellow CMP Technology minion who was in charge of marketing for the conference. She confessed that Gore's press ban had been an unwelcome surprise to her the previous Friday afternoon, which caused her to "use some words I don't normally use." Upon questioning this bizarre rule, Linda was told that the former Vice President "wants to exercise his right as a private citizen to speak however he sees fit without anybody interpreting what he says in a manner he didn't mean it."

Well, don't we all!

I thanked Linda, who gave me the name of Michelle, a public relations representative whose job was to mediate between the conference and the media. Before phoning Michelle, I retired to a coffee house to draft a polemic against the Democrat I had previously thought most qualified to lead his party's ticket in 2008. Among my better thrusts, I questioned Gore's pose as a "private citizen" in light of the fact that he has twice (so far) been a candidate for the presidency, served in the U.S. Senate, served as V.P. for eight years and recently strutted all over the stage at the Academy Awards collecting an Oscar for his documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth."

If Al Gore does not qualify as a "public figure" then Anna Nicole Smith is Eleanor Rigby.

I also noted: "A world leader who refuses to engage in public dialog about his ideas has no legitimate claim to reciting a monolog on those very ideas."

Good stuff, which was soon augmented by EE Times online manging editor, George Leopold, who reminded me that Gore had once been a journalist himself for a base newspaper called The Army Flier and Stars & Stripes while serving in Vietnam and later at the Nashville Tennessean.

Meanwhile, I found in my e-mail a note from Michelle, that began, "Hi, David," and informed me that the ban no longer applied to scribes like me in the "trade press." So, I was in, but my Mainstream Media buddies at the Times, the Journal, the Chronicle and the Mercury News were still SOL.

I was glad I would be allowed to sit at Al's feet and drink in his every word, but I was undeterred in my pursuit of the story. There was a principle involved. If the Embedded Systems Conference could exercise its First Amendment right of assembly and Al Gore could enjoy his First Amendment right to speak freely, then both of them must face up to the inconvenient truth that the press has an equal First Amendment right to show up and report Gore's comments.

Eventually, I got Michelle on the phone, made a date to meet her in the press room at 8:30 a.m. sharp next day and told her I had to meet the Gore people, too—so they could explain how a guy who goes around collecting six figures to speak to gatherings as big as 10,000 listeners can pass himself off as a "private citizen."

Next morning, I was in the press room. Michelle wasn't. I encountered Linda Uslaner again, greeted her and found out that the Gore people had changed their minds and had relented. Everybody could go! Suddenly, I had no reason to talk with Gore's people. My story had disappeared in a puff of, wellpuffery.

I can't claim that I did anything to turn the tide. As a technically-challenged stringer, I am the least consequential of all the journalists at this conference. Moreover, there is no evident political reason for Al Gore to back off on this issue, because, as he says, he's not a candidate for president, nor will he become one, ever again. Honest!

Nonetheless, what if he'd stuck to his guns, making it possible for me to write a story saying he had banned reporters from covering his speech here. And what if the story got out? It would ill-serve any public figure with known presidential qualifications to embroil himself in a battle over the freedom of the press, especially when that public figure, a noted liberal and former newsguy, would be taking a position more consistent with the attitudes of Ed Meese, Karl Rove and Dick Cheney than with those of Ben Bradlee and Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis.

I'm not saying I accomplished much by pestering flacks. I probably didn't. After all, I'm not Bob Woodward. But it certainly was a curious sequence of events.

—David Benjamin is a New York-based writer who occasionally covers technology issues for EE Times, usually from the Luddite point of view.