Time (magazine)/YMMV

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• Magazine Decay: As recently as the 1980s it was primarily politics and current events (with one section covering entertainment in a similarly thoughtful manner) -- and arguably superior to The Economist in its heyday. While politics is still a big focus, celebrity gossip with sensationalist headlines is also featured now, along with fluffy media reviews and whatnot. The Onion skewered the dumbing-down of Time in their video feature "Time Announces New Version Of Magazine Aimed At Adults".
  • Time's annual Person of the Year award could be said to have undergone its own form of decay. The award was not originally meant as an honor, but was given to the person whom the magazine deemed to have had the most influence on that year's events, for good or for ill—it was given to Adolf Hitler in 1938, for example, and Josef Stalin in 1939 and 1942. The choices were often Americentric (every US President since FDR, apart from Gerald Ford, has won the award at least once), but that's a given for an American news magazine.
  • However, the choice of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979 proved to be hugely controversial, as many readers were disgusted with the magazine for "honoring" an enemy of the United States (even though Person of the Year was never meant as an honor). Decay set in as Time stuck with safer choices from then on, such as giving it to Rudy Giuliani instead of Osama Bin Laden in 2001 in order to avoid a similar backlash, which only reinforced the false perception that Person of the Year was meant as an honor. From there, recent years have brought such strange choices as "You" (representing the rise of the online community) in 2006, as well as the creation of a hype machine around the award -- the cover is now unveiled either on CNN or Today, as if they're naming the nominees for the Academy Awards.
  • Time artificially darkened the mugshot photo of O. J. Simpson to make him seems scarier and were called out on it. Jon Stewart declared it the day Print Media "Jumped the Shark".
  • They also lost credibility after they published their (in)famous cover story "51%" (% of American women who aren't married), claiming it was the death of marriage now that the majority of women are choosing to remain single. Except they started counting women as single at 15 years old, and they included widows.