Dec.13

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Dem 47

   

GOP 53

Kissing the Ring, Part II: So Much for Editorial Independence

Yesterday, Donald Trump was named Time's "Person of the Year" for 2024. That means he is now a two-time member of a distinguished club that also includes Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and Vladimir Putin.

Trump sat for an interview with the publication, which Time tries to do whenever possible. We read it, and we would say there are three interesting things about the piece:

1. Trump explained that when he promised to bring grocery prices down during the presidential campaign, what he meant was that he's probably not going to be able to bring grocery prices down. "It's hard to bring things down once they're up. You know, it's very hard." Gee, who knew?
   
   
2. Trump really wants to pass the throne to a family member, and really wanted Ivanka to be that person. However, he told Time that he does not see that happening because "she's so family-oriented." Whether that is a backhanded compliment or not, we aren't sure. Anyhow, he has apparently moved on to a new choice as his preferred successor, and it's... daughter-in-law Lara Trump. We would be generally surprised if he was willing to throw his weight behind someone who is not blood, and we'd also be surprised if he was truly willing to support a woman (even Ivanka) as successor. We'd say the real message here is that he finds Eric and Don Jr. to be disappointments, hence his casting about for alternatives.
   
   
3. If Dunning-Kruger was a disease, and you wanted to know what the symptoms of a fatal case look like, then you would want to read this interview.

All of this said, Trump's answers were overall pretty sharp. It helps that the publication "lightly edited" his remarks for clarity. Also, we suspect they interviewed him early in the day, and not in the late afternoon or evening.

As you can see from the headline, this item is actually about editorial independence, or the lack thereof. Note that we are not interpreting the selection of Trump, per se, as an indicator of Time's being compromised. Recall, the point of the title is to identify the year's biggest newsmaker. In presidential years, it's almost always the winning presidential candidate. In fact, the last time it was NOT the presidential winner was nearly 30 years ago (1996), and even then, they made Bill Clinton a two-timer two years later (appropriately, as a result of his two-timing his wife).

Meanwhile, if Time had put the general rule of "it's the presidential winner" aside, who else could they have picked this year? Putin, or Bashar al-Assad, or Benjamin Netanyahu? Anyone who is cranky about Trump being picked isn't going to like those choices any better. Maybe Volodymyr Zelenskyy, but he was the pick 2 years ago. Maybe Taylor Swift, but she was the pick last year. No, Trump was the obvious choice.

The reason we are looking askance at Time is not because of the selection of Trump, but because of the response of the magazine's billionaire owner, Marc Benioff, on eX-Twitter:

Congratulations to President @realDonaldTrump on being named TIME Person of the Year 2024. This marks a time of great promise for our nation. We look forward to working together to advance American success and prosperity for everyone. May G-d bless the United States of America.

Needless to say, the political establishment and the fourth estate are not supposed to be "working together." If anything, it's supposed to be the opposite. We suppose that Benioff might have chosen his words carelessly, but that's not the explanation favored by Occam's razor, especially since he's enough of a writer to have authored four books.

Also, as long as we're at it, Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong continues to make a mockery of his newspaper. The latest development is that he reportedly quashed an editorial about the shaky quality of some of Trump's Cabinet picks. If the Times' editorial writers are required to handle even the rapist, the probable Russian asset and the vaccine kook with kid gloves, then they might as well just eliminate that section of the paper. How can anyone take the Times' opinion pieces (or its political reporting) seriously as long as Soon-Shiong remains as owner? There are some good people working there (and Z personally knows some of them), but the public isn't going to know it every time he mucks around in the paper's coverage, and so one just has to assume that his fingerprints are on everything. (Z)