Four journalists, one newspaper: Time Magazine’s Person of the Year recognises the global assault on journalism
How do we balance the democratic need for transparency and accountability, with the demands of national security? How do we pay for journalism that is costly and necessary but not always commercially viable? Peter Greste, the Walkley-Award winning journalist who spent 400 days in an Egyptian prison, explores what Time Magazine’s decision for its Person of the Year means for the media, democracy and the world in this crossposting from The Conversation.
Time Magazine has just announced its “Person of the Year” for 2018, and for once, it isn’t one person. This time it is four people and a newspaper.
Collectively calling them “The Guardians”, Time has awarded the accolade to the murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Filipino journalist Maria Ressa who edits the Rappler news website, two young Reuters journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo currently serving seven-year sentences for exposing a massacre in Myanmar, and the staff of The Capital Gazette newspaper in the American town of Annapolis, Maryland, who continued publishing after five of their colleagues were gunned down in an attack in June.
Time’s Person of the Year cover is reserved for those who the magazine judges have had “the greatest impact on the news”, and not always for the better (it famously nominated Adolf Hitler in 1938). Its decision to name a collection of journalists is a marker not just of the impact those individuals have made, but a nod to the wider global crisis of confidence in journalism and “the truth”. The nominees are there partly for what they have done, but also for what they have come to represent.
Khashoggi is undoubtedly the best known of the group. The grim details of his assassination, in which he was lured into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to get documents for his marriage before he was strangled and dismembered with a bone saw, are as compelling as any airport novel. But they also exposed the cynicism of the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has tried to present himself as Saudi Arabia’s Western-friendly liberal saviour while ruthlessly and illiberally cracking down on dissenters.
Never thought I would see the day when I am now careful what I say when asked what I do for a living. Sad. We need great, strong independent media and journalists more than ever.