A Sign of the Time

Yeah, the media is conservative.  And yeah, that sucks, but in I've done my best to not let it bother me, and I've even managed to enjoy certain elements of the conservative media (see: 24).  Having said that, I condemn TIME magazine for it's choice of George W. Bush, president of the United States, as its annual "Person of the Year."  I understand that the distinction doesn' t connote best person of the year, merely the most influential, yet the editors of TIME must know that not all readers make that distinction.  And to those readers - those poor, poor readers - it appears that Bush is indeed the best Person of the Year.          These readers have it rough as it is.  They've spent the last 3 1/2 years in constant fear of the "evil-doers" who are coming to get them; they watch the terror alert religiously (which is the same way they do everything else); they believe their leaders when they say that Iraq is connected to 9/11, and why shouldn't they?  Don't our leaders have an obligation to tell us the truth?  It's not like they would intentionally lie to us and take us into war.  They don't make any money when that happens.

Some may counter that TIME is not biased, as 1992's Person of the Year was Bill Clinton.  Well to those people I say the following: A) Clinton was about as liberal as Newt Gingrich. B) Gingrich was Person of the Year in 1995.  Let's take a look at the track record of this "non-biased" magazine since 1990. Other People of the Year have included: The Two George Bushes (1990), Ted Turner (1991), Pope John Paul II (1994), Intel executive Andy Grove (1997), Bill Clinton and Kenneth Starr (1998), Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos (1999), and, not to be left out, George W. Bush (2000).  People of the Year?  This is a list of the top conservative political, business, and religious figures of the 1990's!  Omitted from it is the 1993 list of history's greatest Peacemakers and the 1996 entry, Dr. David Ho, who is developing a cure for AIDS.  I guess "Bob Dole" would have been a little too obvious.          The notion that George W. Bush was even in the running for Person of the Year was so far from my mind that when my friend approached me and said, "Bush is man of the year," , I conjured up quite a different image:

I was confused but delighted that TIME had finally expanded its coverage to include Africa's finest, but alas, I was wrong.  They had, in fact, honored the perpetrator of the biggest mind-fuck in American history.  Shame on TIME.  Shame.        When all is said and done, it may not matter to me who TIME picks for the same reason that I don't care if John Paul II gets canonized: TIME is written by conservatives for conservatives, and the conservatives who read it admire whoever they are told to.  It's the same way with the Catholic Church: who they choose to look up to in their own system isn't my concern.  But when people start to view TIME as unbiased - when they start to think that this is who everybody should look up to - that's where we run into problems.  John Paul II will probably be canonized specifically because so much praise is being lavished on him, not only by Catholics, but by (who else?) TIME magazine.

See the complete list of TIME'S Person of the Year                                                                HOME