TIME magazine names Biden, Harris its Person of the Year, takes biased swipe at Trump
TIME magazine has announced its choice for Person of the Year 2020. They have chosen presumptive President-elect Joe Biden and his VP Kamala Harris. President Trump was also on the shortlist. However, the profile that TIME published when naming their selection was extremely critical of President Trump.
The Democratic pair was chosen ahead of three other finalists: frontline healthcare workers and Anthony Fauci, the racial justice movement, and President Trump.
TIME’s 2020 Person of the Year magazine cover boasts portraits of Biden, 78, and Harris, 56, with the subtitle “Changing America’s story.”
“For changing the American story, for showing that the forces of empathy are greater than the furies of division, for sharing a vision of healing in a grieving world,” TIME’s editor-in-chief Edward Felsenthal said of the choice.
The author of the profile is Charlotte Alter. She wrote that Biden’s pledge “to ‘restore the soul of the nation’ felt like antiquated hokum at a moment when Hurricane Trump was tearing through America, ripping through institutions, chewing up norms and spitting them out.”
Alter interviewed Biden and was highly complimentary concerning his approach to the campaign. She wrote that to Biden “it wasn’t about fighting Trump with righteous vengeance, or probing any deeper rot that might have contributed to his ascent. Biden believed most voters simply wanted reconciliation after four years of combat, that they craved decency, dignity, experience and competence.”
In 2019, TIME tapped teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg as their Person of the Year. TIME winners in 2018 included slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi; the staff of the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland, where five people were shot to death; Philippine journalist Maria Ressa; and two Reuters journalists, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo. This year it was widely believed that First Responders would be chosen for the title due to the pandemic.
Essential workers on the frontline against the coronavirus pandemic, including doctors, nurses, and grocery store employees, had topped a readers’ poll of who should be named Person of the Year.
#BREAKING: Time Magazine doesn't pick frontline workers as persons of the year who've given and sacrificed so much this year. Instead, they show their far-left tilt (and pure hatred for the 74 million Americans who voted for President Trump) by picking Joe Biden and Kamala Harris pic.twitter.com/gl0XHJcisK
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) December 11, 2020
Many conservatives are likely to view TIME’s choice this year as biased and partisan. In effect, as yet another indication of the mainstream media giving cover to the Biden administration for the next four years.
Liberals see the selection as a return to normalcy and stability in D.C., which is precisely what many Trump supporters believe is a return to the ‘swamp’.
With the nation severely divided over the election results and almost half of the states signing on to a brief with the Supreme Court to overturn the election and the other half accusing those states of sedition, the country has never been more polarized in recent history.
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are TIME's 2020 Person of the Year #TIMEPOY https://t.co/o97QNlSBrl pic.twitter.com/KuoBoebBN4
— TIME (@TIME) December 11, 2020
TIME praised the Democratic ticket for ousting an incumbent president for only the 10th time in U.S. history.
“Biden and Harris had to revive the party’s fading strength with white voters without college degrees; energize its emerging base of diverse, urban young voters; and motivate the hordes of angry suburbanites, particularly college graduates and women, who had fled the Trump-era GOP,” TIME stated.
Alter also praised Harris for providing the Biden ticket with something “a 78-year-old white man could never provide: generational change, a fresh perspective, and an embodiment of America’s diversity.” A sentiment that will potentially further divide an already fractured nation regardless of any American’s political stance.
“Person of the Year is not an award — it is a marker,” TIME said. “It is history as it’s written, whether good or bad.”
