Time magazine has not been a widely-respected news magazine for quite some time, but its recent dismissal of Iranian protesters from contention in its annual "Person of the Year" title takes the once-heralded magazine's prestige to a new and insulting low.As Time announced yesterday, the Iran's Green opposition did not make the editor's final cut for consideration for Person of the Year. One should remember that Time chooses the Person of the Year by determining which individual(s) most impacted the world, for better or worse, during the course of the calendar year. With that in mind, it is unclear how Usain Bolt, an Olympic sprinter who is one of Time's finalists, had more of an impact on the world than the millions of brave Iranians who marched the streets in the face of tyranny and in far too many cases paid the ultimate price with beatings, torture, or even death.
This sort of myopia has been seen from Time magazine before. In 2001, Time outrageously (and cowardly) gave the title to Rudy Giuliani for his role as the Mayor of New York City on and after 9-11, rather than to Osama bin Laden for launching an unprecedented attack that has come to fundamentally change U.S. foreign policy making for decades to come. Naturally, there were sensitivities to be considered in the wake of such a tragic and devastating terrorist attack, but those considerations were for others to make, as Time purports itself as a news magazine. A magazine which in its heyday gave the title of Man of the Year to Hitler, Stalin (twice), and none other than Ayatollah Khomeini as recently as 1979. Not because these individuals "deserved" or "merited" the distinction, but because of the immense impact each had on the world stage. In 1956, the "Hungarian Freedom Fighter" was picked for this very reason.
So what drove Time to not consider the Iranian freedom fighter in 2009? Why was the "Chinese worker" (someone who was not even included in the original poll) considered but not the Iranian protester? Time has not provided an explanation, but there is no doubt that its decision was deliberate. As IranNewsNow points out, Iranian protesters were far and away the most popular choice in Time's online poll, leading with 573,561 votes with President Obama trailing in at a distant second with 111,848 votes. And this does not even mention the fact that votes stopped being tabulated -- yet still accepted -- during the 10 days prior to Time's announcement of the finalists yesterday. And while Time did warn that its "editors reserve the right to disagree" with the results of its online poll, it is a bit more than ironic that in annulling the overwhelming number of votes that called for the Iranian protester to be Person of the Year, Time mimicked what drove Iranians to protest in the streets of Tehran to begin with: a stolen election.
