Time Magazine chickens out with its selection of "You"

Ian_rd

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Mon Dec-18-06 11:16 AM
Original message

Time Magazine chickens out with its selection of "You"

With its choice of "you," Time has chickened out in its selection for Person of the Year. "You," of course, means everybody. And by choosing everybody, Time has essentially chosen nobody. Time could justify itself into selecting "you" every year. The whole point of the exercise is to decide which "you" was the most influential, even if it's a plural "you" as they've rightfully selected before. And while Time's selection of a large number of common people is perfectly justified, this past year in particular, their vague description is a symptom of intellectual cowardice more than it is of laziness.

Actually, Time did make a choice, and their short accompanying article gives insight into their choice even as they are understandably hesitant to be clear about it lest they betray their own irrelevance. Their choice is the bloggers - the news bloggers, opinion bloggers, video bloggers, and the people who consume these blogs. And the inescapable reason behind the success of these blogs is that the mainstream media, Time included, has become ineffective in the business of providing quality news and entertainment to the public, presenting the opportunity for this service to be provided instead by a network of private individuals at their computers.

We can actually thank the enormous media conglomerates for making this possible. With the entirety of the mainstream media being consolidated under the rule of a tiny number of profit-over-quality corporations, there was, and remains, a great void created by the lack of competition in the media industry. As is all too often, a basic truth of capitalism has come to bite the powerful self-described capitalists in the ass, that truth being that competition among businesses is the primary force by which products increase in quality. But with the media being conglomerated into massive monopolies, monopolies being anti-capitalist by definition, no meaningful competition existed, therefore opening the door for bloggers to fill the void.

With regard to the quality of news in particular, one of the most revealing public opinion studies of our time struck a dizzying blow to television news, the front line of the mainstream media, with its conclusions. The University of Maryland Program on International Policy Attitudes found that people who primarily got their news from television were the most uninformed people in the country with regard to issues surrounding the Iraq War. Meanwhile, people who got their news from the internet were the most accurately informed. There is absolutely no reason to believe that the failure of the mainstream news media to inform the public is limited to issues surrounding the Iraq War. We can logically conclude that their impotence extends across all subjects. Where the mainstream failed in something as basic as informing the public, the bloggers succeeded.

Although they state it grudgingly and in vague fashion, Time's choice for Person of the Year is honest and accurate. This past year more than ever, this title belongs to many instead of just one or a few. But if Time allowed itself to state this clearly, they might as well conclude their article with, "We regret to inform you that if you purchase and read our magazine you are disqualified from our Person of the Year selection." So instead, they present it in a way more likely to sell their magazine by stroking the egos of all who see the magazine's cover at the grocery check-out.