Time's Person of the Year Is "The Protester"

Hugh Pickens writes "Time's editor Rick Stengel announced on The Today Show that 'The Protester' is Time Magazine's Person of the Year: From the Arab Spring to Athens, from Occupy Wall Street to Moscow. 'For capturing and highlighting a global sense of restless promise, for upending governments and conventional wisdom, for combining the oldest of techniques with the newest of technologies to shine a light on human dignity and, finally, for steering the planet on a more democratic though sometimes more dangerous path for the 21st century.' The initial gut reaction on Twitter seems to be one of derision, as Time has gone with a faceless human mass instead of picking a single person like Tunisian fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi who Time mentions in the story and is widely acknowledged as the person who set off the 'Arab Spring.' In 2006, Time chose "You" with a mirrored cover to much disappointment, picked the personal computer as 'Machine of the Year' and Earth as 'Planet of the Year,' proving 'that it should probably just be "Story of the Year" if they aren't going to acknowledge an actual person,' writes Dashiell Bennett. 'By not picking any one individual, they've basically chosen no one.'"

Comments

What about RTFA?

[jcombel]

Or are not all attention spans created equal?

Re:What about the Tea Party Movement?

[lambent]

The Tea Party isn't actually protesting anything. They seem to be desperately trying to cling to the status quo in which they've found themselves to be so comfortable.

"Health care for me, not for anyone else"

"No new taxes ... for me"

etc, etc.

See the difference? They're trying to preserve their own position, not trying to actively change things. So, no, they're not protestors.

Re:What about the Tea Party Movement?

[Nimey]

They're talking about /protestors/, not astroturf.

Re:What about the Tea Party Movement?

[jd]

Not really. There's a distinction between rational protesting for and irrational protesting against. 2011 has seen a lot of rational, constructive protesting. The Tea Party was all about irrational, destructive rabble-rousing.

Re:What about the Tea Party Movement?

[chrissandvick]

You're joking right? How about you compare the crime blotters for the two movements. How batcrap crazy do you have to be to see the nihilistic occupiers who violated individual rights, living in filth, committing murder, robbery, rape, assault and call that rational and constructive?

Re:What about the Tea Party Movement?

[Dishevel]

How batcrap crazy do you have to be to see the nihilistic occupiers who violated individual rights, living in filth, committing murder, robbery, rape, assault and call that rational and constructive?

You just say it over and over again many times.
Then you have your buddies in the press repeat it a few hundred more times.
After all that it just sort of becomes truth.

Re:What about the Tea Party Movement?

[mcgrew]

Or are not all protesters created equal?

No. Occupy and the foreign protests were grassroots movements, the tea party was astroturf. Taxes are lower than any time since Truman, and nobody squealed about the deficit until "spend like a drunken sailor" Bush was out of office. The rich Republicans got their idiot redneck followers to join; anybody with a 3 digit IQ can see it.

The Tea Party is a fake movement that's for the very people the Occupy movement is against, and it managed to fool the stupider of the 99% to lobby for things that harm themselves.

If you're a tea partier earning less than $300k per year, you're an idiot.

Re:What about the Tea Party Movement?

[Genda]

I'm sorry you can't use "Mein Kampf" as your standard measure, at least not as a measure for political center. Do you realize, that compared to the political norm that today, Ronald Reagan would have been considered a hippie. Coming out as a click head just informs me that associated yourself with a man whose brain is inversely proportional to his mouth. Sadly the world is rife with them (conservative and liberal.)

TIME magazine has one of the most illustrious histories of any publication in this country. The fact that it has degenerated into its current state is an indictment of the readership and not the publication. Its sadly had to compete with People and a host of vapid infotainment publications that has slowly bled it of its once famous gravitas. The historic images, classic images of the depression, VE Day in New York city, the launch of the Saturn V and man's first landing on the moon, the first ever images of the human embryo developing, the stories of the lives and times of people of the day from a committedly neutral editorial point of view. These were TIMEs bread and butter. I'll bet you're one of those guys who thinks that PBS news is a commie plot, yes? No?

That's saddest thing of all. A publication that tells the straight honest truth, without injecting a spin, or supporting a political view favoring a multinational corporate conglomerate (did I just see a FOX?), or even a publication that doesn't pander to a mouth breathing, knuckle dragging populace, is no longer relevant. Its an anachronism, pushed out by the serial brain farts emanating from Twitter. Its gorgeously rendered images displaced by a continuous flood of crappy, blurry, cell phone snap shots. I know, its a romantic delusion, all things must pass. It just saddens me that the foolish, ignorant, or profoundly irreverent among us, have eroded the beautiful and genteel things in life, and replaced them with fart jokes and MREs (I guess one leads to the other.)

I for one hope TIME hangs around for a while, maybe even finds its way back to greatness. Its a hope.

Re:What about the Tea Party Movement?

[Totenglocke]

Because they were protesting to try to fix irresponsible government spending, while OWS is protesting to add even more deficit in order to avoid having to be judged based on their merits. It's no secret that TIME magazine is incredibly biased in favor of Democrats / Socialists / "progressives" (disgusting term, since there's nothing progressive about regurgitating the same proven to fail ideas).