Time awarded its 2018 Person of the Year selection to four journalists, including Jamal Khashoggi (shown above), and one newspaper — the Capital Gazette of Annapolis, Maryland — collectively calling the designees “The Guardians and the War on Truth,” the magazine announced Tuesday morning.

It also named the March For Our Lives activists as runner up.

Close

“All despots live in fear of their people,” wrote Karl Vick in the Time piece about this year’s winners.

“To see genuine strength, look to the spaces where individuals dare to describe what’s going on in front of them,” he also wrote.

“That world is led, in some ways, by a U.S. president whose embrace of despots and attacks on the press has set a troubling tone,” he later concluded.

A quartet of covers will feature Jamal Khashoggi, the Capital Gazette newsroom, imprisoned Reuters reporters Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, and embattled Filipino news executive Maria Ressa.

Khashoggi was a Saudi national and Washington Post contributor who was murdered in a consulate in Turkey this fall.

Some reports suggested his death was ordered by the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammad bin Salman (MBS).

Who do you think would win the Presidency?

By completing the poll, you agree to receive emails from LifeZette, occasional offers from our partners and that you've read and agree to our privacy policy and legal statement.

Filipino news executive Maria Ressa is facing up to 10 years in prison for what the government in the Philippines says are tax fraud allegations related to her website, on which she is covering the “extrajudicial killings of President Rodrigo Duterte that have left some 12,000 people dead.”

Kyaw Soe Oo and Wa Lone are Reuters journalists who are serving lengthy sentences.

They are currently imprisoned in Myanmar after “documenting the deaths of 10 minority Rohingya Muslims.”

Abandoning all semblance of nuance, the video features a soundbite of Trump shown chastising “fake news,” followed immediately by news clips from October of mail bomber Cesar Sayoc’s targets, including CNN.

In a roughly five-and-a-half-minute documentary-like video explaining its choices, Time featured President Donald Trump and the United States of America, along with unabashedly journalist-hostile, free speech-squelching regimes such as Saudi Arabia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Venezuela, Hungary, Russia, and China.

Abandoning all semblance of nuance, the video features a soundbite of Trump shown chastising “fake news,” followed immediately by news clips from October of mail bomber Cesar Sayoc’s targets, including CNN.

The very next section features reporters from the Capital Gazette of Annapolis, Maryland, where five staffers lost their lives last June to a deranged shooter, Jarrod Ramos.

The connection viewers are meant to make, clearly, is that the president of the United States is responsible at some level for the behavior of Sayoc and Ramos.

Ironically, perhaps, President Trump himself was on Time’s shortlist for Person of the Year.

Michele Blood is a Flemington, New Jersey-based freelance writer and regular contributor to LifeZette.