The quiet impact of the Paradise Papers
The quiet impact of the Paradise Papers
By Jon Allsop, CJR
DECEMBER 22, 2017
1219 WORDS
THE PARADISE PAPERS made a global splash in early November. For a few days at least, the latest mass leak of high-end offshore financial information—curated, like its predecessor, the Panama Papers, by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and partners round the world—refocused global attention on the ways wealthy individuals and corporations lower their tax burdens.
Although the leak prominently featured US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, the reaction to the Paradise Papers was more muted in the US than it was elsewhere. Three big European papers who worked on the story played it across their front pages for days: The Guardian framed large images of implicated celebrities—such as Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Charles, and F1 driver Lewis Hamilton—with a bespoke yellow trim, while Le Monde, and Süddeutsche Zeitung mocked up special graphics and logos to garnish above-the-fold spreads. By contrast, The New York Times—which chose to collaborate on the Paradise Papers despite not having worked on the Panama Papers—put the story on its unchangeable, boxy front page only twice in the week after publication, and one of those articles was below the fold.
Newspaper front pages are a crude measure of media attention and public interest. But the Paradise Papers have struggled for air in a heavily saturated US news cycle—even though the country’s major news story these past weeks has been about tax reform. And even in the UK, Germany, and elsewhere, initial interest has petered out somewhat—especially compared to the reaction that greeted the Panama Papers last spring. “This time we [didn’t have] all the bad guys, Assad, Putin, Mugabe, and so forth, so the attention in general was lower,” says Bastian Obermayer, a Süddeutsche Zeitung reporter who received both initial data leaks.
“The Paradise Papers were always going to be more difficult to get global reaction to, because it no longer had the novelty of being the biggest collaboration of journalists in history and the biggest leak ever provided to journalists,” adds Will Fitzgibbon, a senior ICIJ reporter who also worked on both stories.
More:
https://www.cjr.org/watchdog/paradise-papers-icij-tax-havens.php
