When complex tax legislation becomes unbelievable

When Taxation asked me to write 800 words explaining why the mainstream media occasionally struggle to report accurately on tax matters my initial thought was: ‘Well it’s because tax is complex and explaining complex things is complex. Hmmm or is there more to this I could write in another 788 words?’

It is pretty ironic when a professional journalist’s skill (I don’t claim to be one) is to focus on the impact to engage the reader and boil down an 800-word argument into a single sentence. But let’s try and expand.

First let’s consider the backdrop: an increasingly complex tax code a younger social-media-grown generation of readers with the attention span of a gnat (not tax professionals of course!) mainstream media distributions failing and journalists pressured to churn out more copy quickly sometimes with pre-determined narratives that...