Reaching pinnacle narcissism shocking even for 2018 levels, TIME Magazine announced Tuesday that they were naming journalists – so basically, themselves – their own publication's latest “Person of the Year.”
Heroically dubbed “The Guardians” in the December issue, TIME highlights several reporters, columnists and journalists they say earned their less-than-prestigious annual honor.
⚡️ “TIME Person of the Year 2018: The Guardians”https://t.co/iNBTzMi22b pic.twitter.com/CjUFYAxc5i
— TIME (@TIME) December 11, 2018
Included among them are Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist for the Washington Post who was killed by the Saudi government earlier this year; Filipina journalist Maria Ressa, who's being sued for tax evasion after criticizing the Philippine government; Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, who’ve been imprisoned for nearly a year in Myanmarafter reporting on the slaughter of Rohingya Muslims; and members of the Capital Gazette, a Maryland newspaper who lost four staffers and a sales assistant after a disgruntled gunman unhappy with the paper came into the newsroom and opened fire.
"In a world where budding authoritarians have advanced by blurring the difference, there was a clarity in the spectacle of a tyrant’s fury visited upon a man armed only with a pen," TIME poetically waxed.
"That world is led, in some ways, by a U.S. President whose embrace of despots and attacks on the press has set a troubling tone," the magazine goes on. '“I think the biggest problem that we face right now is that the beacon of democracy, the one that stood up for both human rights and press freedom—the United States—now is very confused,” says Ressa, the Rappler editor. “What are the values of the United States?'"
This is the first time since the magazine first began handing out its Person of the Year honor in 1927 that the paper has bestowed the award on a deceased person.
As for Donald Trump, who was apparently TIME’s runner-up for the award, the magazine snidely explained, “His ultimate impact may be determined as much by the resistance he engenders as by the goals he pursues.”
Like their leftwing counterparts in Hollywood, leave it to the media to award themselves honors and trophies for their “resistance,” even as increasing numbers of Americans say they don’t trust today’s “journalists” to do the basics of their job: tell the truth.