Time's 2012 Person of the Year Won't Be Kim Jong-un
Ignoring the will of the people — or at least the hacking collective 4chan, which hacked its online poll in favor of the North Korean Supreme Leader — Time's 2012 Person of the Year shortlist includes the usual mixed bag.
.Ignoring the will of the people — or at least the hacking collective 4chan, which hacked its online poll in favor of Kim Jong-un — Time's 2012 Person of the Year shortlist does not include North Korea's Supreme Leader. Instead, the 85th annual honor will go to one (or two) of seven people (and/or things): the female and male CEOs of the year, a couple of presidents, a group of immigrants, two D.C. doves, or an Italian in a particle collector. In advance of Wednesday's morning's reveal, here are the official finalists, as first unveiled on the Today show this morning.
- Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo
- Mohamed Morsi, President of Egypt
- "Undocumented Americans"
- Bill and Hillary Clinton, Mrs. and Mr. Secretary of State
- Barack Obama, President of the United States
- Tim Cook, CEO of Apple
- Higgs Boson and Fabiola Gianotti, the building block of all matter and one of the physicists who "discovered" it
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Malala Yousafzai, the young girl gunned down by the Taliban
It seems like Time has covered their bases in filling the types of persons they like to choose: 2011's Person went to the amorphous "protester", which the equally amorphous "undocumented Americans" could sub in for; 2010's honor went to Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, a really rich and really smart tech wonk like Cook and Mayer; 2008 went to Obama and the magazine could go the same way after Obama's reelection; and 2007 went to the power-laden Vladimir Putin, and this year we have the power-hungry Mohamed Morsi.
The list leaves off the man who won the magazine's online poll after almost 5.6 million votes. Sorry, 4chan — there's always next year.