JAMAL KHASHOGGI IS THE RIGHT TIME PERSON OF THE YEAR – FOR ALL THE WRONG REASONS:

Khashoggi’s death, TIME tells us, ‘laid bare the true nature of a smiling prince, the utter absence of morality in the Saudi-US alliance and – in the cascade of news feeds and alerts, posts and shares and links – the centrality of the question Khashoggi was killed over: Whom do you trust to tell the story?’ Let’s remember that before he fled to the US a year before he was cruelly murdered in Istanbul, Khashoggi became rich working for a Saudi royal family that was, and remains, among the world’s worst persecutors of journalists. He edited government-controlled Saudi newspapers, which are without exception regime propaganda outlets, and headed TV news channels that were owned by Saudi princes.

Then he outdid himself by working as a media adviser to a senior Saudi prince in London and Washington. He embraced with unbridled enthusiasm his role of justifying Saudi regime atrocities in the Western media. He even denied on the BBC that anyone was ever tortured in Saudi Arabia.

Time magazine declaring a leading purveyor of fake news as one of its “Persons of the Year” sums up the current state of Time magazine perfectly.

Meanwhile, at the intersection of journalism and Twitter, Time’s editor-in-chief, Edward Felsenthal tells the Today show’s Savannah Guthrie that also included in its “Persons of the Year” for 2019 are “Two amazing reporters, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, who exposed a mass killing of ten Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. And are in prison, actually, one day – a year to the day tomorrow, as a result of their reporting.”

Myanmar is where Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted on Sunday, for those looking for exotic locales in which to meditate, “if you’re willing to travel a bit, go to Myanmar.” As The Hill noted in response, “Twitter users took issue with Dorsey’s tweets, given that Myanmar’s military has been accused of ravaging the Rohingya in what the United Nations has deemed a genocide” — and arresting journalists.