The journalists at TIME Magazine announced their annual person of the year award, and the 2018 winners are, well, other journalists.
“The Guardians—Jamal Khashoggi, the Capital Gazette, Maria Ressa, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo—are TIME’s Person of the Year 2018,” the magazine announced in a Tweet.
TIME, speaking on behalf of the rest of the media, dubbed these morons as “heroes” – the “guardians of the truth” in a time where there is a “war on truth.” How’s that for melodrama? These people really believe that they are superheroes.
As discussed by truthful media outlets – and buried by non-truthful ones – Khashoggi was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, a terrorist organization, during his youth, and even while writing for the Washington Post still had “many friends among the Muslim Brotherhood.” Far from being a hero, Khashoggi was mixed up with a rough and tumble crowd. After his murder, Americans are expected by the press to get down on bended knee and mourn this guy’s loss? No.
The political left does not even care about Khashoggi or Saudi Arabian human rights abuses. If they did, they would have addressed them after 19 Saudi nationals hijacked four planes on 9/11 and used them to kill nearly 3,000 Americans. The left is simply using Khashoggi as a political pawn in an attempt to build a case that President Donald J. Trump poses some sort of threat for rightfully calling journalists liars when they lie about him.
As for the other Persons of the Year:
Maria Ressa is a Filipina journalist who was charged with tax evasion after negative coverage of President Rodrigo Duterte and his deadly drug war. These two items may or may not be related, but TIME is assuming (for the sake of optics) that they are. That is what the leftwing press would normally call a “conspiracy theory.”
Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo are journalists from Myanmar who were jailed after exposing the killing of ten Muslims at the hands of the military. They were honestly pursuing the truth when they were jailed by an oppressive regime. Sadly, their unjust conviction will be overshadowed by the press’ political motivations for keeping Khashoggi in the press.
Five employees of the Capital Post Gazette were killed by 39-year-old Jarrod Ramos, a man with a years-long grudge against the paper, when he burst into their office with a shotgun intent on inflicting maximum damage. This is what an actual attack on the press looks like.
TIME’s willful conflation of speculation and fact (like in the case of Ressa vs. the case of the journalists from Myanmar) its moral equivocation of those killed in their roles as journalists and those who weren’t (like the Post Gazette staff vs. Khashoggi) all in the name of creating a narrative that the press is under attack, is the perfect metaphor for journalism in 2018.
At least TIME got that right.