The 2018 TIME Magazine Person of the Year was announced on Tuesday, December 11 with “The Guardians” winning the honor. “The Guardians” are a group of journalists who have sacrificed everything for their jobs and the “war on truth.”
The journalists include Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi who was murdered for his criticism of the Saudi crown prince; Maria Ressa, a Philippine news website editor who is openly critical of President Rodrigo Duterte; Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, two Reuters journalists who were arrested in Myanmar while investigating a massacre of Muslims; and the Capital Gazette staff, which was the target of a mass shooting earlier this year which resulted in the deaths of four journalists and a sales assistant.
“Like all human gifts, courage comes to us at varying levels and at varying moments,” TIME’s editor-in-chief Edward Felsenthal wrote about the decision. “This year we are recognizing four journalists and one news organization who have paid a terrible price to seize the challenge of this moment: Jamal Khashoggi, Maria Ressa, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo and the Capital Gazette of Annapolis, Md.”
A look at the various covers can be seen below.
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The decision to honor the journalists comes at a time when the free press is often attacked in public and misinformation is at an all-time high.
From TIME’s announcement:
The story of this assault on truth is, somewhat paradoxically, one of the hardest to tell. “We all learned in our schools that journalists shouldn’t be the story ourselves, but this is, again, not our choice,” says Can Dündar, who, after being charged with revealing state secrets and nearly assassinated as a newspaper editor in Turkey, fled to Germany, where he set up a news site. “This is the world of the strong leaders who hate the free press and truth.”
That world is led, in some ways, by a U.S. President whose embrace of despots and attacks on the press has set a troubling tone. “I think the biggest problem that we face right now is that the beacon of democracy, the one that stood up for both human rights and press freedom—the United States—now is very confused,” says Ressa, the Rappler editor. “What are the values of the United States?”
Despite the attacks, journalists around the world continue to prove that the search for truth is stronger than ever.
