Obviously Assange should be the person of the year. Although I personally dislike him for being such a popularity whore, it's obvious Time magazine has been pressured to choose someone less controversial.
But what happened to original principles of this award? Hitler was the person of the year for 1938. This award went always to the person with the highest impact on news. What the heck happened this year? Time magazine is becoming irrelevant.
Who knows what this decision will look like ten years from now - one can imagine Zuckerberg looking like a pretty plausible choice.
However, I agree that the trend you're talking about definitely exists. The most egregious recent example is Rudy Giuliani instead of Osama bin Laden in 2001, a decision which looks even stranger today than it did nine years ago.
it's obvious Time magazine has been pressured to choose someone less controversial
I feel that a far more gloomy and more likely scenario is that companies like Time, Mastercard, etc etc have not been pressured significantly or at all by government
The older you get, the more responsibilities and (financial) risk you have, the harder it becomes to think outside the box and swim upstream. I think it is perfectly plausible that people in their position decided on there own that supporting Assange was a step to far into a brave new world :-)
Or perhaps they just genuinely don't like the guy. They're all American companies run by American people, and Assange clearly has an agenda which does not include the interests of the US.
according to Time Magazine, the person of the year title goes to the person "for better or for worse, ...has done the most to influence the events of the year."
Then they probably made the right choice. Zuck has done far more to influence things in the past year than Wikileaks. I'm not saying Wikileaks hasn't done it's fair share, but as far as real impact to people around the world, Facebook has done more than Wikileaks.
What were the results of the Iraq information Wikileaks released earlier this year? Besides getting coverage in the papers?
Also, consider how much is being done in the business world because of Facebook. Apple, Microsoft, Google - three giants in the industry - are practically dancing to Facebooks tune, reacting. Entire industries are popping up around the social network.
And there was even a movie.
While I don't doubt the good WL is doing, Zuckerberg is doing far, far more than many realize.
Facebook is a fad, something here today, gone tomorrow.
"What were the results of the Iraq information Wikileaks released earlier this year? Besides getting coverage in the papers?"
That is a very simplistic view. What would you expect the results to be, a going back in time and not starting the war? Truth is way more powerful than a simple gimmick of virtualising social interactions. Think, virtualising truth!
Besides, the Iraq files were only one thing. The superinjunction was another which caused actual and real change in the way of invalidating the superinjunction. The ambassador's files has revealed the true way those we trust see the world, etc.
> Facebook is a fad, something here today, gone tomorrow.
Which means little according to the criteria of Times PotY. It's PotYear, not PotDecade, or Century, etc.
> That is a very simplistic view.
Not within the context of the discussion.
> What would you expect the results to be, a going back in time and not starting the war?
I think your missing the point. Zuck meets Times PotY critera more than WL or Assange. I'm not debating the value, merely which has had more impact this past year.
Feel free to debate the merits of Time's decision making process, but please do not to paint their views as mine.
It seems like I'm in a minority, but I don't think there's anything wrong with choosing Zuckerberg over Assange - Facebook has been hugely influential on society, in a way that Wikileaks has so far only promised to be. (I'm not saying that Wikileaks doesn't herald some kind of revolution, but said revolution hasn't happened yet IMO).
I was going to draw parallels to Bill Gates getting the award, though it turns out that was in the '00s, for his philanthropy, not in the '80s for Microsoft. The '82 award to "The Computer" and '06 award to "You" are in the same vein, though (even if the second one was a bit silly).
I have the the original Khomeini copy. It's a gem. The articles inside are well worth the read compared to what we know today as facts regarding the US/CIA involvement.
You see this everywhere now. People get to act like they're being reasonable compromising middle ground moderates by opening up with a personal swipe against Assange and then following up with a vague statement of support for what wikileaks does.
Brilliant observation, I wish I could give you +10.
People are afraid of supporting Mr. Assange or Wikileaks directly, even if they feel like they should, The scare machine is working.
Well, he has got loads of people to persecute him for a rape he probably didn't commit, isn't this what popularity whores do all the time for a little bit of fun. Righttttt?
Wikileaks only really hit the mainstream news less than a month ago. They've obviously been putting this piece together for longer than that. A runner-up article, on the other hand, can be pasted together pretty quickly.
Not to be callous, but no matter how tragic one war crime is, it doesn't rise to anywhere near the level of either the more recent Wikileaks data or, well, a lot of other news events from the year. That is to say, if the Baghdad air-strike video was the only thing Wikileaks did this year, than you wouldn't think Assange should be person of the year.
I think you're being unreasonably dismissive of a valid point: preparing a person of the year issue takes a considerable amount of time, and Assange's most noteworthy act of the year happened relatively late.
In my perception the wikileaks of iraq / afghanistan / cablegate got far more tv-news exposure throughout the year than facebook did. It is true that wikileaks itself became only an issue until nov/dec, but its leaks before that had high news value.
The events surrounding Wikileaks are the ones that are going to go on to define the next decade and influence the future of the internet. Their choice is an easy, popularist one that avoids any political controversy in the USA
Facebook has, this year however, become a mega force, ingrained in society, and pushing to become an all encompassing layer OVER all of reality.
I would say WikiLeaks should be "named" next year (depending on whether anything actually changes / consequences are met with the disclosures). Currently WikiLeaks is in its "infancy" of impact / effect.
Given that the article is published already,it's quite possible that they made the decision before cablegate. Plus it's supposed to be for the year as a whole. While Assange has released other stuff this year (collateral murder, etc), until cablegate, a pretty small segment of the population knew about Wikileaks
You don’t even have to go back to Hitler and Stalin. Vladimir Putin (Person of the Year in 2007) was an at least as ambiguous Person of the Year as Assange would be.
(I’m not sure about your conspiracy theory, though.)
That really wasn’t an attempt to kill discussion. Conspiracy theories are fine, I’m only not willing to accept them just because I feel like it and without further evidence.
Saying “[…] it’s obvious Time magazine has been pressured to choose someone less controversial” (emphasis mine) seems a little too sure to me. I would rephrase that to “Time’s editors might have felt that picking Assange in the current political climate could have resulted in negative consequences, which, if it happened like that, really says a lot about media and politics in the US.”
This is not conspiracy theory. Time magazine admitted in 2002 that they are not going to award person of the year title to anyone controversial to United States anymore.
In 1979 after they have chosen Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini, they had dramatical drop in subscriptions. That was the reason why person of the year for 2001 wasn't Osama Bin Laden although he was obviously the one with the biggest impact on news in the world that year.
Of course there is no objective choice on that, but to give a bit of counterweight to that, I would note that Assange didn't leaked the information. He published it. He was not the one risking prison for getting the data out of the US network. Also the mainstream don't care that much about Assange like the geeks & journalists do. Most people don't care about the cables either.
Zuckerberg, though, created a tool that is used by many many people, and impacts much there daily life and the way they interact together. Facebook brought social networks to the masses.
Assange is in the runner-up, and history will tell what the right choice was.
Also finally, I would have expected the crowd here to be a bit more happy to see a geek - and startup founder - make the headline.
I don't know what Zuckerberg is doing there, but let's hold off on peddling completely unfounded conspiracy theories. More likely, and less unfounded: Old-style news organizations are scared positively pantless by the fact that a blogger (He's a guy with a computer, if that's not a blogger, WHAT IS!?) was in charge of not just one, but quite a few, of the top news stories this year.
A blogger is a person who writes a blog. What's Zuckerberg's blog? (hint: Facebook is not a blog. Even if it was, Zuckerberg would have to write blog entries on it for even some part of Facebook to count as his blog)
But what happened to original principles of this award? Hitler was the person of the year for 1938. This award went always to the person with the highest impact on news. What the heck happened this year? Time magazine is becoming irrelevant.