Time Magazine has revealed that instead of a Person being its Person of the Year for 2018, they have picked four journalists and one newspaper organization as their Persons of the Year 2018, collectively these journalists and media outlet are called simply “the Guardians.”
Wa Lone 32, Kyaw Soe Oo 28: Arrested one year ago held in a prison “on the outskirts of Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city.” The prison, according to Time, is referred to as “the darkest hellhole in Burma.”
Their crime: Their reporting for the Reuters news service that later exposed a mass execution of 10 Rohingya Muslims, part of a violent campaign against the minority group by Myanmar’s military.
— TIME (@TIME) December 11, 2018
Maria Ressa: Founder and editor of a Philippine news site called the Rappler. The site Rappler is “known for its fearless reporting on President Rodrigo Duterte’s propaganda machine and extrajudicial killings.”
For her efforts to expose what Duterte’s administration is doing to the country she has faced a “barrage of government lawsuits,” along with receiving “violent hate messages on social media,” according to Time, at one-point she received ninety of them an hour. On December 3rd, when she turned herself in to face a tax-fraud charge that can result in her serving ten years in prison, she said, “Now is certainly not the time to be afraid.”
— TIME (@TIME) December 11, 2018
The Capital Gazette: In summer of 2018 five people were murdered when a gunmen entered the Gazette’s office in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. This gunmen is said to have held a grudge against the paper for reporting that years earlier he harassed a woman.
Chase Cook a reporter for the Gazette who was not in the office at the time of the shooting reported on the incident saying in a tweet:
I can tell you this: We are putting out a damn paper tomorrow.
— ? Chase Cook ? (@chaseacook) June 28, 2018
And they did put out “a damn paper.”
— Capital Gazette (@capgaznews) June 29, 2018
Jamal Khashoggi: An American legal resident murdered in October 2018 at the Saudi Consulate in Turkey. He traveled to that Consulate in order to obtain documents needed in order to marry his Turkish fiancé.
Time explains this is the first time they have named someone who is not living as a person of the year, “But it is also rare that a person’s influence grows so immensely in death. Directed by a killer whose motive was “control of information.””
Time’s Editor-in-Chief Edward Felsenthal notes in his article that explains Time’s choice for “Persons of the Year 2018,” that with all the insults President Trump hurls at the media, America still, “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.”
For more on “The Guardians and the War on Truth,” @ Time Magazine.
