Time's POTY: Daring to Offend No One

(Crosspost from Green Mountain Daily

Is it possible the national, traditional media has finally hit bottom? The latest Time Magazine "Person of The Year" may mark a watershed point of sorts.

Is there anyone who thinks this is anything other than insipid nonsense? Putting aside it's worth or quality for a moment, in the past, Time's "Person" has been an honest, vaguely interesting attempt to identify the individual who had the greatest impact on the world, for good or for ill. Is there anyone who thinks (especially after 2003's almost equally meaningless winner, "the American Soldier") this hasn't destroyed the meaning, credibility (such as it was) and blandly academic value of Time's Person of the Year feature once and for all? No one, I'm sure.

But that's not the real question, is it? What we should ask is whether or not anyone could possibly be offended by the selection of "you" (WTF?) as Time's Person of the Year. Again, the answer is no one.

And that's really the point, isn't it?

Looking at the last decade, you can almost pity the older mainstream media sources like Time, Newsweek, The New York Times and the major network operations in the face of "advocacy journalism," pundits-as-newscasters, talk radio and the ascendence of Fox News. Not that I share a romanticized version of the "old days" of news - for the most part, it's tended to be a bastion of mediocrity, but with enough flashes of brilliance from time to time to keep the institution relevant. But in the changing face of reporting and the ascendence of niche journalism, the old-schoolers who still try to do the quote-unquote "objective" thing have moved from trying to stay relevant to trying to stay profitable, and we've all seen how that's played out over the years.

Increasingly measuring their impact, revenue and futures against the conservative media monster, the old-liners piled on Clinton in the nineties before adding ridicule and scorn on the likes of Gore and Dean, while giving Bush a virtual free pass. Post-9/11, the old-liners simply parroted the adminsitration's propoganda in the face of all evidence (and common sense) to the contrary, and are now dealing with the inevitable aftermath. Many of the old-liners have found themselves, not as a vanguard of truth, but literally the last to come around to reality. The left figured it out years ago, the blogs, certainly the rest of the world. Even the very population that has defined cluelessness - the Washington Democrats - started waking up to the reality of Iraq, Bush, and the modern Republican, one-party rule before most in the old-line media did.

So what to do? It's tough to do any mea culpas and retain the pretense of credibility. If they try to change their ways now, they'll find the right-wingers just as ready to deride and reject them as ever. And what credibility they had on the left (or, at this point, the middle) is in tatters. Damned if you do, damned if you don't - a perfect recipe for paralysis, stagnation and entropy.

And thus we have the bottoming out of Time's Person of the Year. Meaningless. Pointless. Ridiculous, yes - but safely non-provocative.

All in all, the clearest manifestation of the traditional media identity crisis I could've imagined.

Now, anybody want to place a bet on how many of Time's lingering, long-suffering subscribers bail after this?