Story, person, quote, etc., of the year
Let’s look at choices for the news media’s story, person, quote, lie, word and correction of the year 2019. President Donald Trump figures in three of them,
For Story of the Year, news executives polled by The Associated Press picked the push by House Democrats to impeach the president.
Televised hearings of two House committees and a contentious floor debate culminated in a partyline vote, with Democrats in the majority, to charge Trump with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
He is only the third president in U.S. history to be impeached. A Senate trial is due in 2020.
For its Person of the Year, Time magazine chose not Trump but 16yearold Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg.
Traditionally, the Person of the Year had the most influence on events “for better or worse” in Time’s judgment. The teen addressed the United Nations’ Climate Action Summit in New York. But did she fit this description?
For Quote of the Year, Fred Shapiro, an associate director of the Yale Law School library, chose this: “I would like you to do us a favor, though.”
It was spoken by Trump to Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskiy in a July 25 telephone call, according to others on the line at the U.S. end.
The “favor” would be an announcement by Zelenskiy that his government will conduct an investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden, the leading candidate to be the Democratic nominee for president in 2020.
What Trump said to Zelenskiy prompted an unidentified whistleblower to send a complaint to the intelligence inspector general, setting off the impeachment inquiry.
For Lie of the Year, PolitiFact chose Trump’s claim that the whistleblower got the phone call with the Ukrainian president “almost completely wrong.”
“Despite what Trump claims, the whistleblower got the call ‘almost completely’ right,” said PolitiFact, an arm of the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank and training center.
For Word of the Year, Dictionary.com chose the adjective “existential,” which it defines as “relating to existence.”
Lookups of “existential” on the website jumped during the year when the word appeared in news stories about such ominous subjects as global warming, gun violence and foreign interference in U.S. elections.
For Correction of the Year, the digital edition of the Columbia Journalism Review singled out a beauty in the Financial Times.
The international business newspaper told its readers an article had “incorrectly stated that The Salt Lake Tribune has a fulltime jazz reporter. It in fact has two reporters who cover the Utah Jazz, the local basketball team.”
The FT is owned by a Japanese company and based in London.