“It’s the end of the year, the time when news organizations start compiling lists: top 10 movies or songs of the year, top 10 news stories of the year, and of course, a perennial favorite, TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year,” Sterling Wong reports for Minyanville.
“Before the list was announced, there had been speculation that former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who passed away in October, might become the first person to be given this honor posthumously,” Wong reports. “A panel of TIME magazine experts had spoken about the possibility of nominating Jobs at a discussion in November. Panelist Brian Williams, host of Comcast subsidiary NBC’s Nightly News, said, ‘Not only did he change the world, but he gave us that spirit again that something was possible, that you could look at a piece of glass or plastic and move your finger, that’s outlandish… may he rest in peace.'”
Wong reports, “Ultimately though, the panel of experts does not decide on the magazine’s Person of the Year. TIME’s editors have anointed the Protestor as its Person of the Year, after the regime-toppling Arab Spring that occurred in Tunisia, Egypt, and other parts of the Middle East, as well as the Occupy Wall Street movement… Placing second behind those at Tahrir Square and Occupy emcampments is congressional Republican Paul Ryan, who burst into national prominence with his austere budget plan. And while Steve Jobs was snubbed as Person of the Year, his successor Tim Cook was named as one of TIME’s people who matter.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Since 2001, when they totally blew it by not naming Osama bin Laden, Time Magazine‘s so-called “Person of the Year” has been slightly less meaningful than the Nobel Peace Prize.