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reports in a way that turns off the majority of people. If you keep hearing the same partisan spins back and forth from the only people who report the news, you can turn off your television set for a month and come back almost as if you missed nothing, except for a changed name here and there. People like to feel that they are important to the grand scheme of things, and established media allows for none of that.

So why should a common person be able to cover Congress? Well, let's take this whole argument I've made and take it one step further. Forget bloggers, forget established media, and let's focus on just one person. Quite often, one person can the impetus to getting the answers to questions that no one thinks to ask. During the August 1991 coup in the Soviet Union (the one famous for Boris Yeltsin standing up against the Soviet tanks that eventually brought the downfall of the Soviet Union), the people who took over the government held a press conference where reporters were scared to death to ask any questions that might appear "threatening" to these people who just overthrew the Soviet government and established an oligarchy. A young woman from a publication that consisted mainly of novice journalists and writers from underground newspapers, named Tatyana Malkina stepped forward through the crowd of established domestic and foreign correspondents and asked, "Do you understand that you have staged a coup d'etat?" This turned the quiet press conference into a media feeding frenzy that may have actually turned the tide against the attempted oligarchy. This was one unknown, young woman from a publication that at the time received very little attention and respect.

It is the chance of important moments like that brought forth by Malkina that should always cause us to remember that Congress is representing people, that it is representing us. If people want to believe they are truly in a representative democracy, people need to have access to those corridors of power where representation must answer to the forces of democracy, no matter how much they would like to avoid it and how much wealthy media forces would like to control it.

Learn more about this author, Duane Gundrum.
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