NEW YORK (AP) — Time magazine’s 2018 person of the year are the “guardians and the war on truth.”
The group is made up of four journalists and a newspaper that Time says “are representatives of a broader fight by countless others around the world.
Time’s editor-in-chief Edward Felsenthal made the announcement Tuesday on NBC’s “Today” show. The magazine recognizes the person or group of people who most influenced the news and the world “for better or for worse” during the past year.
The “guardians” are slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi; the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland, where five people were shot and killed at the newspaper’s offices in June; Philippine journalist Maria Ressa, who has been arrested; and two Reuters journalists detained in Myanmar for nearly a year, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo.
tRump:
Perfect. Bravo. Trump of course, said he didn’t see how it could be anyone but, and I quote, “Trump.”
It’s a little bit navel-gazey to say that this was the only appropriate choice, but it’s basically a US magazine. In this moment, this was the only appropriate choice for a US magazine.
Good choice!
Having said that, I might have gone with Putin for two reasons:
What happened to Khashoggi was horrible. It is a disgrace that his real murderers and their various accomplices will never see justice.
But let’s not forget that, in “the war on truth,” Khashoggi was not always on the right side. Before he was a dissident he was part of the ruling faction and editor of a leading Saudi paper, in which capacity he not only toed the (then) government’s line, he also occasionally (but literally) sold his voice to the highest bidder.
Needless to say, Time’s editors are aware of all this. They’re “guardians,” too.