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

Re:TGINS

[identity0]

Although on second thought, "Anonymous" would have been a good choice as well.

Not just the hacker group or 4channers, but all people acting anonymously, like whistleblowers and protesters. Would have been an counterpoint to Zuckerberg.

Occupy a creation of Adbusters media organization

[drnb]

Deluded much?

No, just misinformed. While Occupy may have been co-opted by the Democratic Party, ACORN and related groups who are desperate for a tea party organization of their own, Occupy is a creation of the Canadian media organization Adbusters who is related to the former.

"The Adbusters Media Foundation is a Canadian-based not-for-profit, anti-consumerist, pro-environment[1] organization founded in 1989 by Kalle Lasn and Bill Schmalz in Vancouver, British Columbia. Adbusters describes itself as "a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age." Characterized by some as anti-capitalist or opposed to capitalism,[3] it publishes the reader-supported, advertising-free Adbusters, an activist magazine with an international circulation of 120,000[4] devoted to challenging consumerism ... Adbusters has launched numerous international campaigns, including Buy Nothing Day, TV Turnoff Week and Occupy Wall Street, and is known for their "subvertisements" that spoof popular advertisements."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adbusters

Stopped being credible in 2001

[GodfatherofSoul]

When they made the cowardly decision not to make it Osama Bin Laden. It wasn't intended to be a high school popularity contest; it was the biggest news maker of the year; e.g. Hitler during the WWII era. That's when they started the slide into marketability-driven choices.