Commentary: Time Magazine Journos Basically Just Named Themselves ‘Person of the Year’
by Jason D. Meister
The liberal journalists at Time magazine have an interesting pick for 2018’s “Person of the Year.” That’s right, it’s themselves!
They didn’t quite have the gall to claim the mantle directly, so they went with a somewhat more awkward construction: “The Guardians and the War on Truth.” But Times’ message is clear. They, the journalists, are the real heroes, and the whole world is depending on their bravery in the “War on Truth.” The enemy in that war is, of course, the daily target of their anger and derision: President Donald Trump.
Gracing one of their four covers is Jamal Khashoggi, the late, dissident Saudi newspaper columnist and Muslim Brotherhood sympathizer who was murdered by his own government in Turkey. There’s no indication that Khashoggi’s occasional Washington Post column played any role in his killing, but it certainly went a long way towards making him a cause celebre among journalists eager to use his death to attack Donald Trump.
Alternate covers featured Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, journalists who were arrested for reporting on the Myanmar military regime’s human rights violations, and Maria Ressa, a Philippine blogger who’s been charged with tax evasion after criticizing her country’s president.
Mr. Khashoggi’s death is tragic. So are those of the hundreds of other journalists killed in war zones, executed by totalitarian regimes, or murdered in their own newsrooms for daring to poke fun at Islam. Other journalists face arrest and harassment as they try to break stories.
The liberal reporter-activists at Time magazine, however, are exploiting the murder of Khashoggi and persecution of others to lionize themselves and paint their own primary work — attacking Donald Trump — as inherently noble. That much is clear from their report.
They’re the real heroes, you see. Immediately after proclaiming that journalists are “not at war” with the President, Time’s Karl Vick gloats about 25 Trump administration officials his fellow liberal journalists have pressured to resign with hit pieces.
Vick is especially proud of ProPublica’s release of an audiotape purportedly featuring illegal immigrant children who are crying, which publications like Time and CNN played ad nauseum in an effort to demonize those who support enforcing our nation’s immigration laws.
These “hero” journalists are also, in their own estimation, victims. President Trump, they whine, called them “the enemy of the people,” and is therefore responsible whenever foreign dictators kill or imprison reporters, and pretty much any other time anything bad happens to journalists.
The last of Time’s alternating “Person of the Year” covers features the staff of the Capital Gazette, the local Annapolis, Maryland newspaper where five employees were murdered at their desks by a mentally disturbed man this June.
The killer had been in a deranged, seven-year feud with the paper over a 2011 article that had nothing to do with politics, but that didn’t stop the liberal journalists at CNN, Reuters, Yahoo, Salon, and elsewhere from trying to claim that Donald Trump’s harsh treatment of the press was inspiring mass shootings of journalists. Time’s “Person of the Year” report, of course, makes no mention of that fake news, which has now long since dropped down the memory hole.
In his Person of the Year interview, Capital Gazette editor Rick Hutzell expressed reluctance to accept the “hero” mantle, telling Time, “I hate being the story.” Instead of trying to paint themselves as the central figures in their own imaginary war hero narrative, the liberal journalists at Time ought to take a cue from Hutzell on what used to be a basic rule of professional journalism: Don’t make yourself the story!
Jason D. Meister is an Advisory Board Member of Donald J. Trump for President Inc.
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