For the week of January 2 - 8, 2002

Today’s Time is not our grandfathers’ magazine

Commentary by PAT MURPHY

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If you buy the proclamation in People magazine (an AOL Time Warner company) that actor Pierce Brosnan is "the sexiest man alive," then you can accept the proclamation of Time magazine (another AOL Time Warner company) that New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani is "Person of the Year" who, according to Time’s selection criterion, "for better or worse, has most influenced events in the preceding year."

Both choices are filled with doubts.

Brosnan may be the "sexiest man alive" to the handful of People editors who dwell on men in the celebrity circles they cover, but arguably not "the sexiest man alive" in the whole world.

And although Mayor Giuliani surely deserves rave reviews and the nation’s gratitude for guiding New York through the horrific crisis of Sept. 11 and thereafter, he hardly "has most influenced events in the preceding year."

Time ducked the obvious choice—Osama bin Laden—a man whose maniacal obsession with "infidels" has ignited a worldwide war on terrorism, left a chilling international fear of new sneak attacks on big cities and forever ended the easy-going American way of life.

Time magazine’s probable thinking, notwithstanding its lavish praise of Giuliani and belittling of bin Laden as little more than a dismissible pest, was that picking bin Laden would have invited a staggering boycott of the media giant by advertisers, readers and TV viewers. Remember the outrage vented on ABC television when comic Bill (Politically Incorrect) Maher seemed to criticize U.S. military tactics?

Mayor Giuliani’s feel-good choice was a safe bet at a time when Americans are celebrating patriotism of their own.

Yet, bin Laden, not Giuliani, meets the "Person of the Year" (formerly "Man of the Year") benchmark set 70 years ago by Henry Luce, Time’s founder, who dreamed up the title to lift sagging December newsstand sales. He explicitly included villains as candidates.

Bin Laden has convulsed the world with his firebrand religious zealotry

Cowering in caves of the destitute backwater nation, Afghanistan, bin Laden engineered the kamikaze attack on the World Trade Center’s twin towers with a deadlier loss of life than Pearl Harbor.

As the world’s most wanted fugitive, he has a $25 million reward on his head—history’s highest.

He forced the United States to launch tens of thousands of its best ground, sea and air warriors and their high tech weapons and intelligence systems into action at a cost of billions of dollars, along with the contributions of 50 nations in the war coalition.

Bin Laden’s attack has left the U.S. airline and tourism industries reeling with deep financial losses, followed by massive layoffs and reduced consumer spending, and police state measures to detect and prevent further terrorism.

His name and his followers dominate world news reports and are the major topic of obsessive U.S. television cable networks.

Bin Laden’s infamy has inspired a cultural renaissance in U.S. patriotism and the flying of Old Glory.

In short, the reclusive, cave-dwelling bin Laden almost single-handedly has created upheaval of the world, spread fear and paranoia across the face of the earth and made terrorism a household dread even in the world’s safest country.

Time magazine has every right to believe Giuliani "has most influenced events in the preceding year" just as its companion magazine, People, has every right to declare actor Brosnan the "sexiest man alive."

But editors at both magazines run the risk of treating readers as gullible nincompoops by bestowing superlatives that fail reality checks.

 

The Idaho Mountain Express is distributed free to residents and guests throughout the Sun Valley, Idaho resort area community. Subscribers to the Idaho Mountain Express will read these stories and others in this week's issue.