War reporting without the press pass from the palace
Embedded access is not the same thing as seeing. Independent desks keep paying for the difference.
Every war arrives with a vocabulary kit. The kit is issued at the podium. If you use the kit, you will be invited back. If you count the shells, follow the money, or interview the people who were not in the shot, you will be described as something other than a journalist.
Independent war reporters have spent the last several years proving that the kit is optional. They have also spent those years being locked out of the rooms where the kit is handed out. That is not an accident of logistics. It is editorial discipline, enforced by access.
This paper will not pretend that every critic of a war is a careful reporter, or that every official is a liar. We will insist on the old tests: named sources where they can be named, documents where they exist, and a willingness to publish the part of the story that makes your own side flinch.
A free press that only flinches in one direction is a chaplaincy.