Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was killed in Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul in October, was featured on Tuesday among a group of journalists who were named TIME magazine’s “Person of the Year” for 2018. The magazine said these journalists – given the honorific “The Guardians” – helped expose “the manipulation and the abuse of truth” around the world.
Apart from Khashoggi, the staff of the Capital Gazette newspaper in Maryland, Phillipine journalist Maria Ressa and Reuters reporters Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were also recognised.
The staff members of the Capital Gazette were the victims of a gun attack in June while Ressa is the editor of the Rappler news website and a trenchant critic of the Philippine’s President Rodrigo Duterte. Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were sentenced to seven years in prison in September for violating the country’s Official Secrets Act, 1923, while working on a story on the killing of 10 Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine state’s Inn Din village during an Army crackdown in 2017.
“As we looked at the choices, it became clear that the manipulation and the abuse of truth is really the common thread in so many of this year’s major stories, from Russia to Riyadh to Silicon Valley,” TIME editor Edward Felsenthal said on the “Today” show.
He pointed out that Khashoggi is the first person who is no longer alive to be chosen person of the year. “It is also very rare that a person’s influence grows so immensely in death,” Felsenthal added. “His murder has prompted a global reassessment of the Saudi crown prince and a really long overdue look at the devastating war in Yemen.”
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