Khashoggi, journalists Person of the Year for ‘Time’

Time magazine named a group of journalists, including the murdered Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi, as its Person of the Year for 2018 on Tuesday, honoring their dedicated pursuit of the truth despite a war on facts and tremendous obstacles, including violence and imprisonment.

The choice was a nod to the spread of misinformation in the United States and abroad by leaders who have sought to quash critical independent journalism. And it offered a not-so-subtle rebuke to President Donald Trump, an avid follower of the Person of the Year honor who, when asked last month about the upcoming decision, replied, “I can’t imagine anybody else other than Trump.”

Besides Khashoggi, the honorees include the staff of the Capital Gazette newspapers in Maryland, where five people were shot dead in June; Maria Ressa, the founder of Rappler, a news startup under attack by the authoritarian president of the Philippines; and U Wa Lone and U Kyaw Soe Oo, two Reuters journalists imprisoned in Myanmar after reporting the massacre of Muslim men.

Time magazine published covers honoring each of the recipients, who were collectively called “the Guardians of Truth.”

“It became clear that the manipulation and abuse of truth is the common thread of so many of this year’s major stories, from Russia to Riyadh to Silicon Valley,” Edward Felsenthal, Time’s editor-in-chief and chief executive, said during the announcement on NBC’s

Today show. Khashoggi’s brutal murder in October, at the hands of assassins in the Saudi embassy in Turkey, prompted international outrage at the regime of Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, who the CIA concluded ordered his death. The Washington Post, where Khashoggi was a contributing opinion writer, led an outcry that eventually rattled the Trump White House, an ally of the crown prince.

In a Twitter post, Karen Attiah, the editor who recruited Khashoggi to write for the Post, thanked Time for the honor and shared an adage that she attributed to her late colleague: “Some depart to remain.”

“I wish he was here, I wish he could see this, and I wish we could give him a copy,” Attiah, the global opinions editor at the Post, said in an interview. “It’s obvious that the story has resonated with people in a way that few stories do.

“It sends a signal to everyone in the Saudi regime that committed this,” she added, “and to the people who, like Jamal, are the ones fighting for the rights of free expression. It tells everyone that the story is not over yet, and we are all watching.”

Attiah said she sent a text message on Tuesday to one of Khashoggi’s sons, notifying him about the recognition for his father. He responded with an emoji that depicted a pair of praying hands.

The Person of the Year honor — a marketing intiative that began in the 1920s — is meant to recognize an individual or a group of people for influencing the year’s events.

This was the first time that Time’s editors awarded the honor to people who had died. Khashoggi was a wellknown dissident and writer in the Middle East and beyond, the editors noted, but his work reached a far wider audience after his violent death at the hands of a team of Saudi agents who killed and dismembered him in October.

“It is also rare that a person’s influence grows so immensely in death,” the editors wrote.

One Time cover shows 14 members of the Capital Gazette, where the five journalists were slain.