“PEOPLE SHOULD HAVE stopped caring about Time magazine’s Man of the Year contest some time ago,” writes Dean Barnett in the Weekly Standard. “On a periodic basis, the magazine signaled its chronic frivolity and opted for idiotic gimmicks. You might remember that last year we all won the prize. In an earlier year, the planet Earth won. Even given Time‘s parameters–the award is supposed to go to the person who had the biggest impact on the world in the previous year–these choices showed that even Time‘s editors didn’t take the award particularly seriously.”
General David Petraeus’s, whose “performance in 2007 is likely to have ripples that will last decades,” is the choice of many of us for Man of the Year–but not at Time. Time opted for Vladimir Putin. Barnett notes:
“TIME’S SKEWED VISION helpfully clarifies some of the deep-seated bias and willful ignorance that characterize so much of the mainstream media. David Petraeus stopped being a news story for outlets like Time when he began succeeding. Is there any doubt that if he had fared differently, al Qaeda in Iraq (or al Qaeda in Mesopotamia as the New York Times calls the organization) would have either walked away with the prize–or at the very least ranked higher than J.K. Rowling?”