On Thursday, NBC's Today engaged in their annual ritual of announcing Time magazine's "Person of the Year," which was (zero surprise) Donald Trump. Time tends to defer to whoever won the presidential campaign as the year's most influential newsmaker, but they don't have to be happy about it.
NBC host Savannah Guthrie announced that "for better or worse," Time has picked Persons of the Year, and then editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs also said “for better or for worse, [he] had the most influence on the news in 2024.”
“This is someone who made an historic comeback, who reshaped the American presidency and who’s reordering American politics,” Jacobs said. “It’s hard to argue with the fact that the person who’s moving into the Oval Office is the most influential person in news.”
Jacobs also claimed they spent more time with Trump than any other media outlet. Trump gave Time far more time than President Biden did in the first half of the year, and faced much tougher scrutiny. Jacobs found Trump "a little more subdued" after the election, and already discussed how Trump is sad that this was his last campaign, like he's already passing from the political scene!
Ed Morrissey at Hot Air laughed at finalists like Kamala Harris and Kate Middleton: "consider how miserable Time’s editors had to be to have to choose between Trump and Netanyahu"!
NBC's segment on TIME's Person of the Year uses the term twice that "for better or for worse," they had to pick Donald Trump.
— Tim Graham (@TimJGraham) December 12, 2024
Four years ago, they gushed all over Biden-Harris as saving Democracy. pic.twitter.com/BlLBIiIvBL
Naturally, in 2020, NBC put on a gushy one-hour special to tout Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as their Persons of the Year, and these two were presented as saviors of democracy. Ed Felsenthal, then the editor-in-chief, asked Biden: "Do you think this is a do-or-die moment for democracy?" Biden replied: "This moment was one of those do-or-die moments. Had Trump won, I think we would have changed the nature of who we are as a country for a long time."
Time writer Molly Ball added: “Joe Biden saw what happened in Charlottesville as a symptom of a deeper American disease that only he could fix."
In her 2020 cover story, Charlotte Alter compared Trump to a virus: "All new Presidents inherit messes from their predecessors, but Biden is the first to have to think about literally decontaminating the White House."
Later on CNN, Alter falsely claimed "Biden and Harris won overwhelmingly, by a popular vote margin not seen since FDR in 1932." Whether by raw numbers or percentages, she was wrong. Obama and Biden won by a wider margin in 2008, not to mention Reagan's 1984 blowout.
