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posted by cmn32480 on Monday December 14 2015, @12:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the corporate-agendas dept.

The Inquisitr reports:

On [December 7], Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders won the readers' poll for TIME's Person of the Year, which was conducted online.

The 74-year-old Senator won by [a] landslide, beating out other world-renowned leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, and even U.S. President Barack Obama.

[...] Bernie Sanders won [with] more than 10 percent of the total online votes, while his closest contender, Malala Yousafzai, a young Pakistani activist that fights for the education rights of girls in her country, only got 5.2 percent of the votes.

Aside from beating the U.S. president in the online poll, Bernie Sanders also overran his toughest competitors: Donald Trump (1.8%) and Hillary Clinton (1.4%).

[...] No U.S. presidential candidate has ever won the Person of the Year award prior to the results of the election. However, the fact that Sanders topped the poll is testament that there are still people who will choose to go for someone with whom they share similar views as opposed to someone who is "popular". [Submitter's quote marks; see "Nate Silver", below]

But while Sanders' cause may be noble, which is mostly likely why he earned the top spot in the Person of the Year online poll, it wasn't enough for him to take home the prize. Reportedly, Sanders' name was taken out of the short list from which the editors of TIME [were] supposed to make their choice for Person of the Year.

[...] TIME released the names of the eight finalists for the annual award on [December 8] [...] Sanders and his runner-up Yousafzai were not included in the list of finalists. The finalists included Putin, Trump, Rouhani, former Olympian and transgender Caitlyn Jenner, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, Black Lives Matter activists, and Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, leader of jihadist group Islamic State.

On [December 9], TIME announced the winner during NBC's Today show. Angela Merkel was the unanimous choice of the TIME editors, making her the second individual woman to ever win the award.

The editors second choice was Trump.

This complete disregard for the readers' poll is hardly unprecendented, as demonstrated by the results from 2006:
Hugo Chavez wins "Person of the Year" poll; Time magazine ignores result

Unsurprising to many, AlterNet reports that Trump's presence in corporate media's coverage of the presidential contest is wildly disproportionate to his acceptance by USAian voters.

Trump's true level of support, [according to phenomenally accurate pollster Nate Silver, is] 6 percent to 8 percent of the electorate--or roughly "the same share of people who think the Apollo moon landings were faked", the pollster said.

Previous: Bernie Sanders Leads TIME Magazine's Person of the Year Readers' Poll


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Monday December 14 2015, @07:18PM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Monday December 14 2015, @07:18PM (#276263) Journal

    Yes, and the decision is based on usefulness as propaganda.

    Now I'm not asserting who the propaganda benefits. To decide that I'd need to review their historical decisions and the context in which they occurred, and I'm not that interrested. The exclusion of Sanders coupled with the inclusion of Trump, however, certainly gives a context within which to evaluate their leanings. (It would have been quite reasonable to either exclude or include both. To select one as an option and exclude the other, however, is clearly biased.)

    N.B.: Hitler was once Time "Man of the Year". So without reading what they had to say about the individual in an article which now won't be written, you can't be sure that they would have been laudatory. But they *will* the selected individual much free advertising, even though it's not guaranteed to be favorable.

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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 14 2015, @07:54PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 14 2015, @07:54PM (#276286)

    > the decision is based on usefulness as propaganda

    Time's criteria for the award is that the person must have a big impact on the world. For better or for worse.

    Trump beats Sanders by a million miles. The guy has done an enormous amount to legitimize the racist elements of the GOP. He made explicit what the GOP leadership has been doing implicitly for decades. He's radically shifted the overton window [wikipedia.org] to make outright racism something that people will accept as legitimate topics for debate. He has given a voice to the worst elements of the american psyche. If we are lucky that will provoke a backlash like France just gave Marine Le Pen over the weekend. But we have a significant chance of going in the other direction and having to relearn the racist consequences of Lindbergh's pro-nazi America First Committee.