Is that light we see at the end of the tunnel?

There's a classic "This American Life" episode entitled "The Middle of Nowhere" that features one of the show's staffers trying to resolve a billing issue with MCI. She spends hours on hold, gets passed from person to person, and never gets anywhere. All she gets is deafening silence. Finally the only way she gets ahead is by enlisting the help of Ira Glass. The whole story veers back and forth between a Joseph Heller novel and something Kafka would write.

"The Middle of Nowhere" was about where we felt by mid-afternoon yesterday, when in desperate frustration we penned an open letter to the Media Affairs office. But then things started to turn around, helping hands were extended, and light appeared. Here's the only score that matters today:

Hope Factor: High

Full report after the jump. (Day One is here; Day Two is here; Day Three is here; and our Open Letter is here.)

By lunch yesterday, call after call had gone not only unreturned but now unanswered. Thinking the Media Affairs office might just not be answering OUR calls, we tried calling from a different number. No luck. We enlisted the help of MediaBistro's editor Elizabeth Spiers, who tried calling from her office in New York. Nada.

As we wrote yesterday, our next step was to ask Elizabeth to fax a formal written request for access. She tried calling to get a fax number. No answer. We each tried the main White House Press Office. Before the Press Office would give us a fax number, they asked each of us who we were. When we answered "MediaBistro" and "Fishbowl D.C.," after a long pause on hold, we each got transferred back to Media Affairs. No answer.

We finally reached Caroline mid-afternoon and she promised someone would call us back. We got a friendly little laugh out of her by begging for someone to return our call and offering to bake cookies, cupcakes, or send flowers. She said she'd try.

Elizabeth similarly reached someone in Media Affairs but the woman answering (Caroline? Jenny?) wouldn't give out a fax number. We had to talk to a spokesperson for that. We each did a post asking for the fax number, and eventually tracked one down. Late yesterday afternoon, Elizabeth finally faxed over a formal request, and we sat down to write the open letter.

After that low point, though, things started to break our way. We got an emailfrom Knight Ridder's Ron Hutcheson, president of the White House Correspondents Association, who said that, without prompting, he'd raised the issue with the White House Press Office. USA Today's media reporter Mark Memmott was interested in writing a story about the saga and he started making calls. Late yesterday, he spoke to a spokesperson who said that that the Press Office had gone ahead and cleared us in.

While we still haven't heard back from Media Affairs, we did get an email from someone who handles credentials for the Press Office last evening (our first communication back from the White House all week) that seemed to imply we'd be able to attend a briefing next week as long as we provided vitals. (There's no briefing or gaggle today because the President's on the road in Indiana.)

We put out calls this morning to confirm that everything is set, but no formal word yet.

So is this it? Come next week, will Fishbowl D.C. be the first blogger to attend a White House briefing? (Have other bloggers covered a briefing before?)

We'll keep you posted.