Since 1927, TIME has presented a Person of the Year awarded to the most influential person of the year. From the first winner, Charles Lindbergh, to the most recent, Pope Francis, the types of individuals who “best represent the news of the year” varies greatly. How then could this even be an accurate competition at all?
“It has a great origin story — or maybe more of a legend. At the end of 1927, the editors of TIME looked at the year’s covers and realized they had somehow failed to put Charles Lindbergh on the cover” Kelly Conniff wrote in a TIME Magazine article about “Everything You Wanted to Know.” While now pretty deeply rooted in news history as far as being a notable “award” to an individual every year like Conniff says, it was originally the result of an oversight. It was TIME's way of catching up and reminding people of someone significant to whom they may not have paid attention.
The Person of the Year award is often a fairly controversial choice. Fair enough, considering the criterion is "the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or ill, and embodied what was important about the year." As a news company, TIME has the right mindset to create the award based on influence and representation of the year as a whole instead of on praise for good deeds. But how in the world are TIME editors supposed to choose one person or even a group of a few people to represent the year as a whole?
The range of individuals has no bounds and the different contestants are often incomparable. How could one, in 2012 for example, compare several people on the shortlist like Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer, Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi, Undocumented Americans, Bill and Hillary Clinton and Malala Yousafzai? These six parties come from different walks of life and are of totally different social and economic statuses.
While one could argue that all of their contributions to society were intangible forces of good and bad, they also did completely different things. In what way could one compare Yousafzai, a young women’s rights activist to another runner-up, Apple CEO Tim Cook? There is no real way to compare the reach of their actions and stories. There is no way to measure the significance those achievements have had on both society and individual lives. In short, it’s all relative to the audience looking at TIME's shortlist for the award.
Of course, TIME puts out its reader polls for the public to vote on who they think should be the winner despite it being independent from the actual choice. Voters can vote on who they think is the Person of the Year for 2014 from options including Taylor Swift, Elon Musk, President Barack Obama and the Chibok Girls. In a way, this is a closer indication of who truly is impacting the most people. However, sites and organizations like 4Chan are known to troll many of TIME’s online reader polls which then misconstrue data. Therefore, there is no real way to judge one Person of the Year across so many different disciplines and backgrounds.
However, Time is doing a great job with publicity to help increase awareness of influences the public and many of its readers may have overlooked, like Charles Lindbergh and his historic flight way back in 1927. Between poll updates and Twitter hashtags, it's obvious that Time is doing a great job of recognizing these individuals. However, they should move toward a general recap of the year and go for “People of the Year.” After all, you don’t see just a single Nobel Prize handed out every year.
Reach the columnist at kayla.chan@asu.edu or follow her on Twitter @kaylarc214.
Editor’s note: The opinions presented in this column are the author’s and do not imply any endorsement from The State Press or its editors.
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