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11th Dec 2018

Time magazine names Jamal Khashoggi and other journalists their ‘person of the year’

James Dawson

The end of year issue of the magazine describes ‘the Guardians’ who have sacrificed themselves in ‘the War on Truth’

Time magazine has named Jamal Khashoggi and other murdered and persecuted journalists as its collective person of the year, ahead of world leaders such as Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.

Each year the American magazine names the person or persons it considers to have had the biggest impact in 2018 that “for better or worse” has “done the most to influence the events of the year.”

Journalist Jamal Khashoggi was killed after he entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October. Staff from the Capital Gazette, Maria Ressa, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, were the others named in Time’s editorial.

Members of staff at The Capital Gazette were the victims of a shooting in America earlier this year, where five members of staff were killed.

Maria Ressa founded the online news site Rappler in the Philippines in 2012 that has repeatedly questioned President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs and the accuracy of his public statements, leading to the site’s license being revoked by the state and the company accused of tax evasion.

Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo are two Reuters journalists who investigated the massacre of ten Rohingya men and boys in a village in western Myanmar’s Rakhine state.

Others on the shortlist to be named person of the year included Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, migrant families separated at the U.S. border, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, student gun-control activists and Christine Blasey Ford, a sexual-assault accuser of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.