Time's "Person of the Year," of course, goes to a nominee chosen by the magazine, and therefore someone selected from the standpoint of service to the interests of the American capitalist class. The magazine was long owned by the Luce family, and later was the flagship of the giant Time Warner media conglomerate. It was sold last year to Meredith, publisher of glossy upscale magazines like Better Homes & Gardens. Then, in September 2018, Meredith sold Time to Marc Benioff, the billionaire owner of Salesforce.com, who will run the magazine as a stand-alone piece of personal property, like Jeff Bezos of Amazon, who owns the Washington Post.
The pro-imperialist perspective was elaborated by editor-in-chief Edward Felsenthal in an essay explaining the magazine's choice of "Person of the Year," in which he declared, "For all the insults hurled by the president at the press, rhetoric which has been deployed by dangerous actors around the world, the US remains a beacon for truth and free expression. This is a nation where, as we saw this year, a news organization can sue the White House and win, even at the hands of a judge appointed by that very White House."
The editor-in-chief is silent on the fact that the Obama administration brought more leak prosecutions -- usually invoking the Espionage Act -- than all previous US governments. He says nothing of the jailing of Chelsea Manning, the calls by US officials for the assassination of Edward Snowden, or the declaration by then-CIA director, now US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, that WikiLeaks is a "hostile non-state intelligence service."
Even more remarkably, the Time cover story elaborating on "The Guardians," while it begins with a paean to journalists who challenge authority, becomes a lengthy argument in favor of censorship of the internet, citing the alleged flood of Russian propaganda during the 2016 US presidential election campaign.
The cover story argues that Facebook is in line for "an overdue reckoning on how to control the driverless car of social media," and criticizes Google because its YouTube subsidiary has posted videos produced by the Moscow-based RT network. The article concludes, "Information on social media turns out to be hugely problematic."
Indeed it does -- from the standpoint of the ruling class. Not only is information disseminated without adequate "control" by the corporate-controlled media (here the headline "The Guardians" takes on a sinister connotation), but the internet has become the vehicle for the self-organization of working people independently of the other "guardians" of capitalism, the trade union bureaucracies and "left" parties of the bourgeoisie, as shown in the US teachers' strikes and the "yellow vest" protests in France.
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