Time honors ‘The Guardians’
Time said its 2018 Person of the Year is “The Guardians,” four individuals and one group — all journalists.
WASHINGTON — Time magazine announced Tuesday that its 2018 Person of the Year is “The Guardians,” four individuals and one group — all journalists — who this year helped expose “the manipulation and the abuse of truth” around the world.
They are the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post contributing columnist who was killed inside Saudi Arabia’s Consulate in Istanbul in October; the staff of the Capital Gazette newspaper in Maryland; journalist Maria Ressa, the chief executive of the Rappler news website, who has been made a legal target for the outlet’s coverage of Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte; and journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, who have been jailed in Myanmar for nearly a year for their work exposing the mass killing of Rohingya Muslims.
“As we looked at the choices, it became clear that the manipulation and the abuse of truth is really the common thread in so many of this year’s major stories, from Russia to Riyadh to Silicon Valley,” Time magazine editor Edward Felsenthal said on the “Today” show Tuesday.
Of Khashoggi’s selection, Felsenthal said it was the first time the magazine had ever chosen someone no longer alive as Person of the Year. But it wasn’t so much the brutal details about his death as the work he had done most of his life — holding Saudi Arabia’s government accountable —that solidified his legacy.
“It’s also very rare that a person’s influence grows so immensely in death,” Felsenthal said. “His murder has prompted a global reassessment of the Saudi crown prince and a really long overdue look at the devastating war in Yemen.”
Time also honored the staff of the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, where five staff members were shot to death in June after a gunman opened fire in their newsroom. Despite the tragedy, the Capital’s surviving staff persisted in their work in the hours, days and weeks afterward.
The Capital Gazette is owned by The Baltimore Sun, which, like the Chicago Tribune, The Morning Call of Lehigh Valley, Pa., New York Daily News, Hartford Courant, Virginia’s Daily Press and The Virginian-Pilot, Orlando Sentinel and South Florida’s Sun-Sentinel, among other publications, is a Tribune Publishing newspaper.
Time also recognized journalists across the world.
Felsenthal emphasized that the two Reuters reporters who were being honored, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, had been imprisoned in Myanmar for almost a year. The two had been covering the mass killing of 10 Rohingya Muslims in the country last September, and in their reporting had found Myanmar troops were complicit in the executions — part of a wave of killings, rapes and arson internationally condemned as ethnic cleansing of minority Muslims in the majority Buddhist country.
Police learned of their investigation and gave the two men documents in a meeting three months after the massacre. Shortly afterward, the reporters were arrested for possessing the documents, which they had not read, in a plot widely derided as a farce to punish them for their work. Their story was published in February. In September, they were sentenced to seven years in prison.
For her work in the Philippines, Felsenthal praised Ressa as an “extraordinary individual” who has exposed the thousands of extrajudicial killings taking place as part of Duterte’s war on drugs in the Philippines. Ressa’s outlet, Rappler, has distinguished itself for coverage of Duterte’s brutal drug war amid tightening access to news.
President Donald Trump was the magaine’s runnerup, and special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election, was third, Felsenthal said.