Obama is Time's 2012 person of the year.....

[GermanyChris]

Let's also note that W was also on that list twice :0)

Thanks elistan for proving my point

[tshrimp]

Originally Posted by citizenzen

Who in this list has more impact than Obama?

Almost anyone.

[tshrimp]

Originally Posted by zioxide

see the bold at the bottom



It's not political at all. It's about the person who dominated the news the most in the past year. You can't deny that it was President Obama. Hell, you talk about (or complain at least) him at least as much as others on here.



Thank you for continuing to be delusional and giving me my daily laughs. Because we all heard about those study results that showed on average Fox News viewers have IQs 20 points below the rest of the networks.



She was in the news for like 2 weeks.



I've said it before but the non-stop crying by the Republicans is hilarious. It's like a 3 year old crying because you took away their toy, except it's actually funny.



finally somebody actually reads the thing. I'll repost what eric wrote in case you guys missed it

Time's Person of the Year features and profiles a person, group, idea or object that "for better or for worse, ...has done the most to influence the events of the year."

The Presidential election completely DOMINATED the news for nearly all of 2012. Obama won it. That's why he's Person of the Year. No other person influenced the news or was talked about as much as him, and that's the whole point of this award.

It looks like your definition is whoever is in the news most is the person of the year. I would think it would be whoever makes the highest positive impact would be that person.

[citizenzen]

Originally Posted by tshrimp

It looks like your definition is whoever is in the news most is the person of the year. I would think it would be whoever makes the highest positive impact would be that person.

Well, then you're not very familiar with the criteria by which the title is bestowed.

[tshrimp]

Originally Posted by citizenzen

Well, then you're not very familiar with the criteria by which the title is bestowed.

Citizenzen with his "you must not be educated" type of comment.

From Time Magazine itself....

http://www.time.com/time/nation/arti...189630,00.html

"Question: What is your criteria for picking the Person of the Year?

Jim Kelly: Well narrowly put, it is the person who most affected events. But we tend to take a longer-range view of who should be the Person of the Year. So one year we chose an AIDS researcher; another year we chose Andy Grove, the head of Intel. And those two folks were not the biggest newsmakers of the year, but we thought their impact would be something people would talk about 10 or 20 years from now."

But maybe you are correct in that we will be talking about Obama 10-20 years from now....in the way we talk about Carter.

[zioxide]

Originally Posted by tshrimp

It looks like your definition is whoever is in the news most is the person of the year. I would think it would be whoever makes the highest positive impact would be that person.

Nobody cares what mine or your definition is. It's Time magazine's award, they chose what the award was going to be for, and Obama fits that criteria they chose quite well.

[hulugu]

Originally Posted by ericrwalker

Person of the Year (formerly Man of the Year) is an annual issue of the United States newsmagazine Time that features and profiles a person, group, idea or object that "for better or for worse, ...has done the most to influence the events of the year.


As I read the wiki description of what the person of the year is, I can see now why he was the winner.


Looks like Hitler and Stalin (twice) even made the list.

Yeah, the POY list is weird in this regard. It's not the best person, it's the person who drove the news coverage. So, last year's POY was the protestor because of the Arab Spring. This year it's Obama. Fine.

In 2000, it was Bush and in 2004, it was Bush again. So, essentially, if you win the US Presidency, you're that year's POY.

Okay. It's a weird way to deal with such an award—once it was You, the American soldier, etc.—but it does create it's own coverage doesn't it?

[citizenzen]

Originally Posted by tshrimp

It looks like your definition is whoever is in the news most is the person of the year. I would think it would be whoever makes the highest positive impact would be that person.

Well, the classic definition of TIME's Person of the Year
is the person who most affected the events of the year,
for better or for worse. ~ TIME Editor Jim Kelly

This would help to explain why the title was bestowed upon ...

Adolf Hitler 1939
Joseph Stalin 1939 & 1942
Nikita Khrushchev 1957
Richard Nixon 1972
Ayatollah Khomeini 1979

The criteria for this title seems to become a topic of discussion on a regular basis—much to Time magazines delight—as some people mistakenly believe Person of the Year is a humanitarian honor. It is not.

The title was also given to the following, who like Obama, had just won a presidential election ...

Franklin D. Roosevelt 1932
Harry S. Truman 1948
Jimmy Carter 1976
Ronald Reagan 1980
Bill Clinton 1992
George W. Bush 2000

In the cases of Roosevelt, Carter, Reagan, Clinton and Bush, the titles were bestowed just a couple of months after election to their first term in office. It would appear that campaign and election was sufficient to warrant the title—there not being enough time for accomplishments, either good or bad.

That should explain how Obama qualified for this years title, though I'm sure you and the other dissenters in this thread would prefer to believe that the editors of Time magazine received a brick through their window carrying the warning that if they didn't give Obama the honor, they'd find themselves swimming with the fishes at the bottom of Lake Michigan.

[Mac'nCheese]

Originally Posted by tshrimp

Citizenzen with his "you must not be educated" type of comment.

From Time Magazine itself....

http://www.time.com/time/nation/arti...189630,00.html

"Question: What is your criteria for picking the Person of the Year?

Jim Kelly: Well narrowly put, it is the person who most affected events. But we tend to take a longer-range view of who should be the Person of the Year. So one year we chose an AIDS researcher; another year we chose Andy Grove, the head of Intel. And those two folks were not the biggest newsmakers of the year, but we thought their impact would be something people would talk about 10 or 20 years from now."

But maybe you are correct in that we will be talking about Obama 10-20 years from now....in the way we talk about Carter.

As in: Carter's mission to free the hostages failed. Obama's mission to kill Bin Laden didnt. Carter couldn't win that second term. Obama did. Etc

[citizenzen]

Originally Posted by Mac'nCheese

As in: Carter's mission to free the hostages failed. Obama's mission to kill Bin Laden didnt. Carter couldn't win that second term. Obama did. Etc

Details ... details ... details.

[B777Forevar]

I though Kim Jong Un was person of the year.

[Eraserhead]

Originally Posted by tshrimp

in the way we talk about Carter.

What as someone who's done a hell of a lot of good for the world in the past 30 years?

[NickZac]

I think Farmers should have been given the award. Without them, we'd be in a tough place.