Time Magazine unveiled its “Person of the Year” Tuesday morning, and the winner was a group of journalists dubbed “The Guardians and the War on Truth.”
The magazine honored Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist who was killed by Saudi agents earlier this year in Turkey, the staff of the Capital Gazette newspaper, who lost five colleagues this year in a mass shooting, Philippine news website editor Maria Ressa, the Reuters journalists who are detained in Myanmar.
All of the honored journalists have either been killed or jailed because of their work. The magazine released four magazine covers to highlight the winners.
The covers focusing on the Capital Gazette’s fallen journalists featured a number of staffers who survived the shooting. The Reuters cover featured the wives of the two jailed Reuters reporters holding photos of their husbands, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo.
The winners were selected from among 10 finalists that included President Trump, the 2016 Person of the Year, and special counsel Robert Mueller, the 2017 Person of the Year runner-up.
The title recognizes “the person or group of people who most influenced the news and the world — for better or for worse — during the past year,” according to the magazine.
The “Silence Breakers” of the #MeToo movement were last year’s Person of the Year for coming forward with stories of sexual harassment and assault and helping force a national reckoning.
Also on the 2018 shortlist were the student protesters from the March for Our Lives, Russian President Vladimir Putin (Time’s Person of the Year in 2007), and psychology professor Christine Blasey Ford, who testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee during nomination hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. She was the most prominent of multiple women who accused Kavanaugh of sexual assault.
Peter Bailey-Wells can be reached at peter.bailey-wells@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @pbaileywells.