Thank God we found out Thursday night that the governor and his guests "dined on mesquite grilled swordfish, corn macque choux, and Florida strawberry shortcake."

Or did they?

Can the people of Florida be absolutely sure? What if diners were really inside that mansion chowing down on roast beef, spinach casserole and English trifle?

How might that have torpedoed the ship of state?

Luckily, we had reporters from The Miami Herald, St. Petersburg Times and others in the press corps to confirm the menu.

None of them were dinner guests, mind you, but it wasn't for lack of trying. More about that later.

Noses pressed against the front gate of the governor's mansion, seething and twittering and probably freezing, a group of the press corps' most diligent reporters waited the two or three hours it took for diners inside to take a tour of the residence, eat and share stories. It was their journalistic obligation, to be sure.

Finally, when the front door of the mansion opened and guests emerged and made their way to the gate, the tsunami of reporters engulfed them. All but one of them.

That would be me.

I had been inside the mansion, too. I was one of the governor's guests. I am, or was – technically, anyway -- part of the press corps.

Yet, I managed to pass by the crowd outside unimpeded, asked not a single question by reporters who were busy getting details of what went on inside from the three legislators among Gov. Rick Scott's six dinner guests.

In case you didn't catch that, allow me to repeat it: They were asking the three legislators, not the person in the press corps, what was discussed inside the mansion.

The legislators they are committed to “watch.”

The reason they wanted to be inside the mansion, remember?

I had been right there, walked right past them. Not a question was I asked.

This tells you a couple of things about how the media elite think and how they cover the Tallahassee landscape these days:

• They don’t think conservative Sunshine State News’  journalistic ethics rise to their gold standard. That’s why they truly believe, even with 42 years as a newspaper journalist, if asked what went on in the mansion, Nancy Smith would probably lie.
• Sunshine is in the tank for Rick Scott. After all, it failed to defend the media’s anti-Rick Scott editorial board positions during the elections, relentlessly picked on their darlings Bill McCollum and Alex Sink in columns, and most offensive of all, Sunshine staffers trust their readers – not the press corps – to tell them if they’re operating responsibly and ethically and if they’re getting the news right.

Here's the bottom line: Anybody with a fully oxygenated brain can see that the media elite in Tallahassee are a dysfunctional family of spoiled children. Until Rick Scott’s inauguration, they called the shots. They had friends in Capitol offices to help them get information, gain access, trade favors. They made the rules.

Doesn’t happen so much anymore. Scott makes the rules now. He brought in a lot of new people, chased out many of the old staff, leaving the press corps at square one to forge relationships all over again.

Other governors, Charlie Crist in particular, “invited reporters to attend social meetings at the mansion” – as one irritated reporter put it. But the word the reporter left out was “hand-picked.” Crist hand-picked the reporters he invited. He most certainly had his favorites.