Time Stops at Nothing

[Geee]

American Spectator:

To illustrate its Person of the Year cover story, Time magazine posted a gallery of portraits on its website. On Page 11 of the gallery is a portrait of Egyptian-American journalist Mona Eltahawy, who was "arrested and assaulted by police in Cairo." Beside her is the portrait of Ray Lewis, a retired Philadelphia police officer arrested at… Occupy Wall Street. Just two peas in a photographic pod.

Page 13 of the gallery features "Jack," an Occupy Oakland protester "wounded by a projectile fired by police." Note the similarity in phrasing between the lines describing Jack's experience and Mona Eltahawy's. Just two innocent victims of a runaway police state.

After two more pages of Syrian and Egyptian protesters (one of the Syrians said he was "tortured for three days"), and we get to a portrait of young Molly Katchpole. Molly endured the unspeakable brutality of anticipating the arrival of Bank of America's $5-a-month debit-card fee. Bravely, she started an online petition asking the bank not to impose the fee. It didn't. She was saved. Time pictures beside her a cut-to-pieces Bank of America debit card in the same way it pictured beside the Syrian protesters two pages earlier a broken iPhone that had belonged to one of them. A never-enacted $5 bank fee = arrest and torture.

Throughout the gallery of mostly Egyptian, Spanish, Greek, Syrian, Tunisian protesters are six Occupy Oakland protesters, three Occupy Wall Street protesters, one pair of Occupy The Hood protesters, and a woman who wore a manifesto on her back that denounced Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. There are two Tea Partiers thrown in apparently for balance.

Missing was a photo of a single London "protester." But of course, they weren't protesters so much as rioters, you say. Ah, but they were listed, along with all the others, in the cover story.

It would be preposterous to link all of these protests together, as if they were part of one, great, worldwide movement, or to equate them, as though their various protagonists were agents in causes of equivalent moral validity. But Time does:

It's remarkable how much the protest vanguards share. Everywhere they are disproportionately young, middle class and educated. Almost all the protests this year began as independent affairs, without much encouragement from or endorsement by existing political parties or opposition bigwigs. All over the world, the protesters of 2011 share a belief that their countries' political systems and economies have grown dysfunctional and corrupt -- sham democracies rigged to favor the rich and powerful and prevent significant change. They are fervent small-d democrats. Two decades after the final failure and abandonment of communism, they believe they're experiencing the failure of hell-bent megascaled crony hypercapitalism and pine for some third way, a new social contract.

The students and professionals standing up to the military in Tahrir Square were protesting "crony hypercapitalism"? The hooligans who burned London were justified in their looting and arson? This is not reporting; this is unadulterated socialistic propaganda.

[Jill]

Well, I can see why this rag is dying. OWS is *only* a news story because journalists and the MSM *made* it a news story. 9.1 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, Islamic takeovers, Bin Laden, last Space Shuttle flight but they pick OWS?

[Casino67]

Every year they get 48-72 hours of free publicity. I think their criteria is what outrageous selection will get the most notice. Pretty soon Time will be only a memory as Collier's is now.

[RandyM]

Time who?