Nominating someone, anyone, as “Person of the Year”, is as political and ideological as it is objective or technical. Every award that is given has its discontents. In the media we sometimes present nominations as being commonsensical, but those decisions are almost always ideological, sometimes deeply biased and personal. Sometimes they are fair…
Apart from official awards and forms of recognition or titles bestowed by state monarchies, institutions or foundations, we, in journalism and the media, indulge in identifying “persons of the year” in sport, community services, social activism, business, politics and economics. The same applies to awards in general.
The public, that most amoebic of forces, tends to be divided about the choices that are made in the media, or by the media. There is a grave misunderstanding of the criteria by which a “Person of the Year” is selected. The first time I took notice of this was when Mikhail Gorbachev was (first) named “Man of the Year” by Time Magazine, in 1987. He received the award again in 1987. What startled many sensibilities (I was a young/aspirant journalist and photojournalist) was that a (bloody) communist was selected as Time Magazine’s “Man of the Year”. Time Magazine was, after all, the cynosure of the Western establishment. I learnt then, and after further study found that awards by the media, or foundations, for that matter, are as much based on ideological choices as they are on “objective” criteria.
The choice of Gorbachev in 1987 and 1989 was both as a newsmaker (objectively) and an expression of US capitalist “victory” over Soviet communism. Much like the way that photographs of a defeated and humiliated Saddam Hussein were a graphic representation of a victory for the US (as explained by Rod Stoneman, formerly of the National University of Ireland, Galway), Gorbachev’s picture on the cover of Time Magazine was a not-so-subtle expression of triumphalism/defeat.
Things land differently with different people. The view from the sedan chair or palanquin is different from the view from the bent backs of the enslaved. The point here is that whomever is presented as “Person of the Year” is not a unanimous choice – outside the newsroom.
Time Magazine had, since 1927, granted the award to any person who “for better or worse, has had the most impact on the year’s events”. This explains why politicians like Winston Churchill, China’s Deng Xiaoping and Joseph Stalin each received the award (twice!). This year, Time Magazine provided a list of 100 “most influential people”. It’s all about the influencers.
The ideology of granting awards
The granting of awards is rarely free from ideology, politics or what people consider to be important to them, which they then extend to others. If you’re an economist or rely on economics-speak, you might grant an annual award to an economist or a banker or a corporate leader – which is perfectly understandable.
The Academy Awards, commonly known as The Oscars, have their own set of criteria, and the organisers can be quite blind and insular. In his 2012 opening monologue at the Academy Awards, actor and comedian Billy Crystal famously said: “Nothing can take the sting off the world’s economic problems like watching millionaires present each other with golden statues.”
Politics and ideology also slip into the Nobel Prize awards. I am a great (great!) admirer of Orhan Pamuk’s oeuvre, but we cannot escape the political basis of the award he received in 2006. He may disagree, and he has, but the Nobel foundation was accused of granting him the award because of perceived pro-Western and anti-Turkish biases. All you have to do is say you “speak truth to power”, and all is forgiven, I suppose. Writers cannot be detached from society; they reflect the cultures and the very identity of society. I do not (myself) discount my ideological preferences – least of all when it comes to literature and the arts, in general.
In 2001 the Nobel Prize for Literature was given to VS Naipaul, a thoroughly racist and deeply offensive person, who was terribly bigoted about Africans, Indians and Asians in general. I should repeat: Naipaul and Pamuk are two of the finest writers of the past three or four decades.
Likewise, you would find it exceedingly difficult to find anyone who believes that JM Coetzee was/is a racist; I think his book Disgrace was probably a high point of the white male gaze of black and brown people in South Africa. It does not help, of course, that he took the escape route to Australia after democracy in South Africa; Australia has become a home for people who were uncomfortable with black governance, and who would use crime (a real problem) as an excuse when they really feel much more comfortable among fellow emigrants… Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
The general conclusion is that Coetzee is not a racist, and that his views simply illustrate “the complexity of race”… We have to believe that Pamuk is not a sycophant of Western dominance and not guilty of European sycophancy, and that Naipaul was simply misunderstood. And while we still have to figure out why Barack Obama received a Nobel prize, it is no comfort to the families of people who were killed by his targeted assassinations. There is only the slightest difference between US President Donald Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s extrajudicial killing of people in a small boat off the coast of Venezuela and Obama’s targeted assassinations.
As mentioned above; the view from the sedan chair or palanquin is different from the view from the bent backs of the enslaved. And writers and artists represent the culture and sensibilities of the society in which they are embedded. So, the decisions to hand awards to people are rarely free from bias or prejudice.
Objective
I agree with my colleague Stephen Grootes that Lesetja Kganyago has done a fantastic job of keeping inflation low – if low inflation is an end in itself. But if we were to be objective (and I don’t claim to be objective) and nominate a person of the year solely on the basis of newsworthiness, Trump would be way ahead of anyone.
While I believe in systematic global change as a historical phenomenon, Trump has shown that individuals can nudge the world in one or another direction. The same may be applied to Deng Xiaoping. Adolf Hitler did this too, but for no more than a decade when the world, correctly, fought his fascism.
China has continued to expand since Deng, but Hitler’s horrors are finding fertile grounds in Europe (see here and here), the US, Argentina and, more recently, albeit only slightly, in Japan, with its apparent return to militarism, a far-rightist political economy and designs on East and Southeast Asia that were last witnessed in the 1930s.
Only my personal bias prevents me from nominating Trump as Person of the Year.
Only fear prevents me from nominating whom I actually believe deserves special mention at the end of 2025. DM
Ismail Lagardien is a writer, columnist and political economist with extensive exposure and experience in global political economic affairs. He was educated at the London School of Economics, and holds a PhD in International Political Economy.