Getting media access to the G8 and G20 summits seemed simple: just upload a letter of assignment, a mugshot, and a scanned passport on an online form. In fact, it was easy, it just turned out not to mean much.

Along with 10,000 delegates, and a larger number of protesters, 4,000 members of the media were in Toronto to cover the summits, but except for a few hundred select journalists, no one got anywhere close to the leaders in either Muskoka or Toronto.

How to get into that elite group was a question that few organizers or journalists would or could answer. According to an official from the ministry of Foreign Affairs who refused to be named, each country’s summit media delegation had only two places in the highly restricted pools that provided the only access to the Deerhurst Resort in Huntsville and the heavily fortified Metro Convention Centre in downtown Toronto. “They go to the wire services and the big networks,” he explained.

Without non-governmental or independent bodies administering media access, it’s easy for the G8 and G20 to control how they’re represented. With the exception of very high-profile journalists, or those already attached to a travelling press corps, reporters have an incentive to provide favourable coverage if they want to be invited back.

This sort of relationship noticeably coloured the reactions of some journalists. Several Chinese journalists — working for Xinhua and CCTV — seemed anxious and refused to comment when I asked them how they felt about the access they received in Toronto as they watched a World Cup match in the International Media Centre.

Some journalists weren’t allowed in at all. Canadian Jesse Rosenfeld, representing The Guardian newspaper from the U.K., was arrested on Saturday evening covering the protests, instead of the summits themselves. He had applied for media accreditation, but didn’t receive it in time after the RCMP reportedly stalled on doing a background check. In the past, Rosenfeld had written stories criticizing the Harper government for its unwavering support of Israel.

The relationship between governments and the media usually plays itself out in more subtle ways. Stella Dawson, a journalist for Reuters, explained that past summits had provided easier access, allowing journalists to ask questions directly to high-level delegates, while access now requires much more carefully built up, established relationships with members of the government. Even huge media outlets like Reuters rely on “very, very good sources with the government officials and their aides going into the summit,” she said.

This seemed to be the only way to get close to the leaders at all. Besides one short press conference on Sunday afternoon in Toronto, with first-come-first-serve access, there was no explicit application process for access to the assembled leaders. Young staffers at an information desk earnestly took down names and requests for pool spots throughout the weekend on whatever paper they had on hand, but there was no indication of where the requests ended up — if they ended up going anywhere at all.

So obvious was the futility of trying to get into the summit meetings and press conferences that many journalists simply gave up. With the range of sources and subjects so restricted, many seemed happier to chat and watch World Cup soccer in incongruously arranged Muskoka chairs than to digest the intermittently issued press releases and communiqués.

An Argentinian reporter, who wouldn’t give her name to protect her job, said that there was no point in bothering trying to get close to the prime ministers and presidents. Had she tried — and had she managed — the scene probably wouldn’t have been much different from what was projected on the enormous screens hanging above the cavernous media centre.

Dawson observed that over the past decade, the amount of access given to journalists has decreased dramatically. “Looking back at finance ministers’ meetings that I used to cover, certainly the G7 — finance ministers and central bankers — it was phenomenally open, in the 1990s, they’d be in a hotel… you’d just walk up to them,” she explained, going on to call the current style of meetings “a stilted, stylized affair.”

With even the largest multinational wire services frustrated at the restricted access to the G20, small and alternative publications have been left with almost no options. Unable to confront those dictating the terms of globalization, independent journalists like Amy Goodman, whom I ran into on Queen Street in front of a line of riot police, preferred to spend their time on the streets, where they could talk directly to a public mobilized in vociferous opposition to the high security and obfuscated workings of the G8 and G20.

Some journalists do try to work within the conditions allowed. Danielle Webb, National Bureau Chief of the Canadian University Press, an association of university newspapers, spent the better part of three days trying to cover the summits as an accredited member of the media at the International Media Centre. Without extensive previous experience covering similar events, she had a hard time getting concrete information about how to get close access to leaders.

Like Dawson, Webb said that “a co-ordinated effort to build relationships with people like the PMO’s media branch,” was key to getting access to high level sources. At the same time, she was adamant that the independence of the student press — like that of much alternative media — had its advantages. During the protests against the summit, “the mainstream media was taking the side of the police; I think we need to be wary of the media taking such definite sides,” she said.

Though she eventually managed to get into the same room as the world leaders, at Sunday’s closing press conference, the one event open to all journalists, Webb spent much of the weekend working from home. The resources were the same — “I was watching the same thing at the press centre or on a live feed on the internet at my house,” she said.

Even with such highly formalized and closed-off summits, there has been astute reporting on what was discussed inside the security fence, along as the phenomenal outpouring of amateur and non-mainstream reports of the mayhem that gripped the rest of Toronto. International summits are never realistically going to be covered with the same vibrancy and diversity that protests can be. But that doesn’t mean that world leaders need to be hermetically sealed from the media, while journalists are left decoding communiqués and watching TV feeds.

As the shock of burnt cars and mass arrests recedes — although it might take a while, given the intensity of some reports still coming out of Toronto — cogent analysis of what might change after the meeting of the world’s 20 largest economies met will no doubt begin to emerge, from both the mainstream and alternative media. But those analyses will fundamentally be lacking if reporters continue to be unable to witness — and challenge — the interactions that decide how the world will be run.

Emilio Comay del Junco is the managing editor of The McGill Daily at McGill University, Montreal. He was an accredited independent journalist during the G20.