Hey, don’t look at me, I voted along with the majority on that poll. But then again, I also voted for Al Gore in 2000. And change you can believe in 2008.
See a pattern there?
This goes to show you, this is a Republic we live in - not a direct Democracy.
As for the TIME, its editors made it no secret that it ultimately came to them, the editors, to choose who the actual Person of the Year would be and they, the editors, reserved the right to disagree with the majority.
This is the American way.
The story goes that, back in the Gilded Age, artist Frederic Remington telegrammed the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst to tell him all was quiet in Cuba and "There will be no war." Hearst responded "Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war."
And thus, the term “yellow journalism” was coined to describe the kind of coverage that helped promote the Spanish-American War of 1898.
Closer to our times, Blueprint Magazine, the official publication of the DLC (a plagiarized edition of Commentary and the Murdoch’s Weekly Standard) has been credited with lining up many reluctant Democrats behind Bush’s unilateral venture in Iraq.
Even after things started falling apart in Iraq, the DLC remained unrepentant. Here is a sample from a pre-election Blueprint Magazine article:
The term "yellow journalism" originated with the Yellow Kid (from the comic strip, Hogan’s Alley) that was running in the two rival newspapers, Pulitzer's New York World and Hearst's New York Journal, which quickly became known as the yellow kid papers---hence the expressions "yellow kid journalism," and "yellow journalism," later.
Though it is nowadays mostly used to qualify tabloids sensationalism, the expression remains widely in use.
The color is traditionally associated with cowardice. But when it comes to cowardice, nothing, I think, equals Vanilla Journalism.
i.e.,
- what the Times’ editors did,
- when a publication suppresses or minimizes real news so as not to steer any controversies over events that are rightly deserving of more attention.
Yellow Journalism and Vanilla Journalism are but just two sides of the same coin. Both kinds of journalism are equally dishonest in their design and their intent. But while the first kind is typically more virulent, the miasmatic nature of the second makes it more underhanded, and the most offensive of them all.
MORE >
