The US journalist forced to sit in a closet during a political fund-raising event (reported here yesterday) has blogged about the bizarre incident.
Scott Powers, a political reporter with the Orlando Sentinel, stresses that he entered the closet willingly.
He was asked to enter what Democratic party officials prefer to call "a room used for storage" after turning up at the home of a party contributor to report on speeches by the vice president, Joe Biden, and Senator Bill Nelson.
"I was free to leave," writes Powers, "but if I left I'd probably have to leave the house entirely, and not get to cover the speeches."
So what was the closet (aka "a room used for storage") like?
"It had a light, a window somewhere in the back behind the shelves full of boxes, and a few square feet of open space in the front.
They set up a small table and a chair for me. They offered me food, which I declined, and brought me a bottle of water. They closed the door. I sat to wait, mistakenly thinking it would be only a few minutes.
The door wasn't locked, though every time I opened it and stepped out to see what was going on a staffer told me I couldn't come out yet. He'd let me know. It was more than an hour, and when I was finally led out."
While Powers was in the closet, "getting impatient and annoyed", he snapped a picture with his cell phone and emailed it to his editor, Bob Shaw.
Shaw then wrote up an item and posted it, with the picture, on this blog. Both then were published in the paper the following morning.
The blogosphere took off, with with rumours piled upon surreal speculation. Then a Taiwanese computer animation company created the above video spoof, which was posted on YouTube.
So Powers found it necessary to deny reports that he had been kidnapped and held hostage and, to that end, gave an interview to the Drudge Report.
"I thought that would end it," he writes, "but it only opened flood gates, from other media... Now we have ClosetGate: the latest big Washington scandal, it seems."
Source: Orlando Sentinel blog