The WSJ and NYT Spin Elite Tax Fraud as “Good News” (William K. Black)
William K. Black explains how mass media are working to shift the blame from their corrupt owners to the corrupt governments they also happen to own.
The WSJ and NYT Spin Elite Tax Fraud as “Good News”
William K. Black
TripleCrisis.com, April 7, 2016
A single Panamanian law firm—one of many hundreds of such firms in the world that specialize in aiding tens of thousands of elites to evade taxes—has had over a million of its documents leaked to a consortium of investigative journalists. Neither the New York Times nor the Wall Street Journal are part of that consortium, and neither seems embarrassed about that failure. Instead, they have filled their pages with pieces about the Panama leaks that are spun so brazenly and bizarrely that as a reader even I was shocked at their audacity.
The New York Times was late to the story, but its April 5, 2016, analytical piece Peter Eavis that bore this astonishing title: “In Panama Papers, Finding the Good News in Widespread Tax Cheating.” The Wall Street Journal, despite its less bizarre titles managed to surpass the NYT with the volume and the blatancy of its spin. In an April 5, 2016, article entitled “Panama Papers: Hiding Cash Has Become Crummy Business.” The thrust of that story is that laundering money and tax evasion is a “crummy business” not because it is immoral and destructive, but because it is purportedly experiencing reduced profitability.
But the WSJ’s editorial pages always trounce the increasing lunacy of their news pages. News of endemic fraud by elites is simply an opportunity to attack the paper’s enemies. Bret Stephens’ op ed has a title that exemplifies this attack syndrome: “‘C’ Is for Corruption: The Clintons are the Brazilianization of American politics.” A reader might wonder what all of this had to do with the Panamanian leak.
This is Stephens’ explanation.
“China: A leak of 11.5 million documents from Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca—instantly dubbed ‘the Panama Papers’—implicate relatives of President Xi Jinping along with other top officials of sheltering fortunes in offshore tax havens. Mr. Xi is supposed to be leading an anti-corruption campaign.
“The Panama Papers have also exposed billions in assets belonging to close friends of Vladimir Putin …
“But nobody can be surprised by any of this. And nobody should look away from the central lesson of the scandal, though they’re trying. To wit, the story here isn’t about tax evaders and offshore accounts, deplorable as they may be. It’s about public policies and incentives that make a career in politics an expedient route to personal enrichment.”
See, the story isn’t really about corrupt private elites—it’s about corrupt government elites. Except that from Murdoch’s perspective this means a chance to take a shot at the likely Democratic presidential nominee.
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