PRESIDENT Donald Trump’s response to reporters last November when asked about who should be Person of the Year: “Trump…I can’t imagine anybody else other than Trump, can you imagine anybody else other than Trump?”
His bubble of self-aggrandizing must have painfully burst when the very people he has been denigrating, demonizing and undermining have been the ones who got the distinction he has been obsessing about for a long time.
TIME Magazine’s 2018 Person of the Year went to “The Guardians,” the honor awarded to journalists who, in their pursuit of the truth, had paid the sacrifice of being harassed, imprisoned, and even killed.
According to the reporting of NBC News, the age we we live in now is a dangerous time to be journalists with what has been happening to the world. “With a record number of reporters behind bars around the planet — the Committee to Protect Journalists documented 262 cases in 2017 — an avalanche of misinformation on social media and government officials from the United States to the Philippines dismissing critical, real reporting as “fake news.”
In the TIME Magazine cover are four pictures of these courageous journalists who have all been targeted for doing their job. Among them is the Philippines’ very own, Maria Ressa of Rappler.
According to NBC News, “The former CNN bureau chief started the online news site ‘Rappler’ in 2012 and has reported critically on Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte.” According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, that coverage earned the site a “campaign of legal harassment” from Duterte’s Department of Justice.”
Another journalist honored, albeit posthumously, was Jamal Khashoggi, whose brutal killing had been widely talked about internationally.
As NBC News reported, “The Washington Post columnist and United States resident penned columns critical of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — and was brutally killed inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, in October.” The CIA has concluded with “high confidence” that bin Salman ordered his murder, although Trump has seemingly dismissed that assessment, saying, “It could very well be that the crown prince had knowledge of this tragic event — maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!”
Also honored are four journalists and sales associate who were gunned down in a mass shooting at Maryland’s state capital newspaper, The Capital Gazette, in June. According to NBC News, authorities said the assailant — who had sued the newspaper and lost after it reported on his guilty plea in a criminal harassment case — targeted the paper in a “coordinated attack.”
“The Guardians” also included Myanmar journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo. As NBC News reported, “A judge in Myanmar sentenced the pair of Reuters journalists to seven years in prison in September. Their crime? Breaking a colonial-era state secrets law while reporting on the military’s mass killing of Rohingya Muslims.”
RUNNER -UP: Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the man tasked to head the independent probe investigating the alleged conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia in damaging Clinton’s campaign to help Trump win the presidency.
Trump has been characterizing Mueller as “conflicted,” “not the man you think he is” and the Russia probe a “witch hunt.”
According to TIME, “Mueller has spoken only through his work: in the hundreds of pages of known court filings, some of which laid out Moscow’s alleged plots to help Donald Trump win the presidency; in the 34 people and entities he charged with crimes this year; in the plea deals he made with Trump’s former lawyer, former campaign chairman and another top campaign aide. Beyond that: Nothing. No interviews. No press conferences. No tweets. No leaks.”
“Mueller’s silence has invited noisy speculation from partisans. To critics on the right, he is an overzealous prosecutor drunk on power and roaming beyond his mandate in a bid to drum Trump out of office. To liberals, he is a crusading hero who won’t quit until he brings the president to justice. The public narrative of Mueller’s investigation this year has often described its central character more as myth than man.”
TIME’S commentary comparing Trump and Mueller is spot on: “Trump and Mueller could hardly be more different. One created a public persona as the embodiment of gaudy capitalism; the other is a reticent patrician, driven and serious, who’s devoted his life to institutions. One embodies disruption, the other consistency. One flouts the rules, the other enforces them. One is the avatar of disorder, the other the personification of order. Nothing less than core principles of American justice and self-government are at stake in their struggle.”
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Gel Santos Relos is the anchor of TFC’s “Balitang America.” Views and opinions expressed by the author in this column are solely those of the author and not of Asian Journal and ABS-CBN-TFC. For comments, go to www.TheFil-AmPerspective.com, https://www.facebook.com/Gel.Santos.Relos
