In late 2013, Bloomberg’s then editor-in-chief, Matthew Winkler, spiked an investigation into the hidden wealth of China’s elite. Publishing it, he warned reporters on a call, would “wipe out everything we have tried to build.”

More than a decade on, that trade-off, access versus accuracy, has hardened into habit. Reporters have learned where the lines are, and words quietly vanish from drafts.

This is not a distant problem for Canadians. In 2022, the CBC closed its Beijing bureau after more than 40 years, not through any expulsion, but because authorities simply stopped issuing visas to its correspondents. As editor-in-chief Brodie Fenlon put it, “the effect is the same.”

The CBC did not trim its coverage to preserve access, as Bloomberg did; it was pushed out altogether. Yet the absence serves Beijing’s purpose all the same: whether a newsroom softens its own language or loses its correspondents entirely, the result is fewer independent eyes on China and a thinner, more cautious record of it.

Under Xi Jinping, the Communist Party has expanded its control over political language to the point where it challenges journalism’s most basic task: describing the world accurately.

Words like “authoritarian” and Xi’s name in anything but flattering contexts are charged enough to invite visa denials, expulsions or quiet exclusion from official access.

When German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, rightfully or wrongfully, called........

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