In case Time’s Person of the Year made you feel a bit cynical, Quartz has you covered with a nice antidote. “While Time, the popularizers of the person of the year concept, is right that the president dominated 2012, it’s worth remembering this: His term has largely been defined by his efforts to rescue corporations from themselves, and their attempts to fight his policy agenda,” they exclaim.
TIME Person of the Year: President Obama
(Photo: TIME)
In addition to President Obama, the short list for Person of the Year included Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo!; Mohammed Morsi, president of Egypt; Undocumented Americans; Bill and Hillary Clinton; Malala Yousafzai, the student activist from Pakistan who survived an assassination attempt by the Taliban; Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple; and the Higgs Boson and Italian physicist Fabiola Giannati.
He won a second term. His signature piece of legislation passed judicial muster. He still has weaknesses (see: drones), but ultimately he’s looking a lot stronger in 2012 than he was in 2011. Seems like an obvious one. Side note: Based on the Flickr iOS app alone — a clear sign that things are turning around at Yahoo — Marissa Mayer would have been an awesome choice.
We missed SNL last night, but we have to say that this clip really says a lot about the Time Person of the Year situation. While making Julian Assange look as creepy as possible, SNL gets a lot of jabs in at the oddity of Time picking a boring guy who runs a company that gives away your private data vs. an endlessly fascinating dude who tries to reveal corruption. Well-played, SNL.
OK, so many were gunning for Julian Assange to go into this spot, but at the same time, Mark Zuckerberg is the guy who would probably deserve the honor most if Assange wasn’t in the running. Why? This seems like a pretty good argument: “In less than seven years, Zuckerberg wired together a twelfth of humanity into a single network, thereby creating a social entity almost twice as large as the U.S.” Assange hasn’t done that yet. Plus, wasn’t Assange on the cover of Time like a week or two ago? Seems like he’s already got some high media saturation. source
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