Who’s TIME Person of the Year? It’s Not Trump
Global multimedia brand TIME has named this year’s “Person of the Year” and the award goes to an obscure group, “The Guardians.”
In its shortlist for Person of the Year, TIME had named U.S. President Donald Trump, special counsel Robert Mueller, The Activists, Moon Jae-In, Ryan Coogler, and Meghan Markle.
TIME Editor-in-Chief Edward Felsenthal writes, “Today, democracy around the world faces its biggest crisis in decades, its foundations undermined by invective from on high and toxins from below, by new technologies that power ancient impulses, by a poisonous cocktail of strongmen and weakening institutions.
From Russia to Riyadh to Silicon Valley, manipulation and abuse of truth is the common thread in so many of this year’s major headlines, an insidious and growing threat to freedom…. In its highest forms, influence—the measure that has for nine decades been the focus of TIME’s Person of the Year—derives from courage….
This year we are recognizing four journalists and one news organization who have paid a terrible price to seize the challenge of this moment…. They are representative of a broader fight by countless others around the world—as of Dec. 10, at least 52 journalists have been murdered in 2018—who risk all to tell the story of our time.….
For taking great risks in pursuit of greater truths, for the imperfect but essential quest for facts that are central to civil discourse, for speaking up and for speaking out, the Guardians—Jamal Khashoggi, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, Maria Ressa and the Capital Gazette of Annapolis, Md.—are TIME’s Person of the Year.”
The December 24, 2018 Person of the Year issue of TIME goes on sale on newsstands Friday, December 14.
Photo: TIME
