MAN OF THE YEAR

Steve Jobs – the man who redefined the future of newspapers, the man who redefined the future of music and the man who redefined the future of entertainment – slipped out of Time magazine’s Man of the Year Award.

It’s just the same way, Charles Lindbergh’s trans-Atlantic flight that defined aviation industry escaped Time magazine editors’ attention. To make up for that, Time magazine started Man of the Year award in 1927 with Lindbergh. Uri Gagarin, the first cosmonaut to explore space, did not make it to the Time magazine list.   

The notable misses of Time may read like a list of Nobel laureates: Mother Teresa, whom Princess Diana admired the most; Diana herself; Dalai Lama, who gets global audience. The key players of the 20th century, like Jawaharlal Nehru, Mao Zedong, Marshall Tito, Gamal Abdel Nasser and Ho Chi Minh are left out.

Wallis Simpson (1936), the American lady who punctured the British royalty with the abdication of Edward VIII, scored a psychological victory. But Queen Elizabeth II (1952) regained, in some measure, the lost glory of an empire where the sun never sets. Just the glory, not the territory.  

The beaten Chinese hero, Chiang Kai-shek, and his wife Soong May-ling (1937), and Philippine’s Corazon Aquino (1986), who have made little impact on history, are Time’s favourites.

Every American President is honoured, except Calvin Coolidge, Hebert Hoover and Gerald Ford. The placing of John Foster Dulles (1954), the man who rocked the world with atom bomb threat, Richard Nixon (1971), who opened the finest hour of investigative journalism with a third rate burglary called Watergate, Henry Kissinger (1972), the Lone Ranger of American foreign policy, George Bush Sr. (90), who invaded Iraq in search of weapons of mass destruction but found none, and Bush Jr. (2000, 2004), who let Osama bin Laden hide in Pakistan for his entire presidency, strengthens one’s suspicion that the goal of American Journalism is politics not truth.      

Among the popular American Presidents rank Franklin Roosevelt (1932, 1934, 1941), the only President elected to a third term and the only one who won three awards, and Dwight D Eisenhower (1944, 1959), the only one who won an award before his Presidency. 

Joseph Stalin (1939, 1942) and Adolf Hitler (1938), Winston Churchill (1949) and  Nikita Khrushchev    (1957), Charles de Gaulle (1958) and  Mikhail Gorbachev (1987, 89), and Deng Xiaoping (1978, 85) and Ayatollah Khomeini (1979) lent a measure of credibility to the award.   

Ted Turner (1991) and the Great Gates, Melinda and Bill, (2005) make the award prestigious, notwithstanding the jury. The naming of Albert Einstein as the Person of the Century in 1999, with Roosevelt and Gandhi as runner-up, is a political coup only Time can come out with, obviously to cover up the goof-up.   Pope John XXIII (1962) and Pope John Paul II (1994) give the final benediction, compelling us to say, Amen. 

Rupert Murdoch saw the future of newspapers in i-pad and called it the game-changer. In ten years from now, you will not find newspapers as we know them today. Instead, you will find them on your cell phone with an expandable screen, updated every hour.

Newspaper houses will buy television channels, or vice-versa, and form media conglomerates broadcasting and disseminating news electronically. Radio, television and online newspapers will become part of the Multimedia Revolution (Convergence) about to take over the media scenario. In ten years from now, you will be scrolling i-Newspad, when your niece or nephew will ask you, `What are these newspapers?  

`It was Steve Jobs who killed them. They were alive and kicking till i-pad,’ you might say – perhaps with nostalgia for the good old days!