Funny how TIME slips away

UPDATED BELOW

There seems to be a decent amount of hubbub over Time Magazine's Time100 (most influential people) not including George W. Bush, but including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, and the likes of Rosie O'Donnell and Angelina Jolie. Needless to say, right-wing blogs are fairly up in arms over this perceived snub.

At first glance, I'd say that fear of Time's collapse is greatly overblown. I mean, they probably didn't pick Bush to be on the list, because frankly, they like the idea of picking new people every time. After all, Bill Gates didn't make this year's list either after making it many times in years' past (including co-Person of the Year), and it's not like he's gotten any less philanthropic, or that his software isn't still flying off the shelves. Still... Oprah's made the list every year since its inception. And with turmoil continuing at the magazine, I don't think it's just right-wingers who have reason to complain. (For more on the back room shake-up at the magazine, read this New York mag profile from a while back.)

For example, the week that the first wave of revealing documents in the U.S. Attorneys scandal broke, Time had exactly zero articles about it. Not even a blurb on what may be one of the most damning scandals to befall a Justice Department since J. Edgar Hoover ran the FBI. I guess they decided it wasn't quite news. Then, before you know it, they come back swingin' the other way, suddenly champions of the cause.

I suppose this whole situation illustrates the state of traditional news media: smacked by the left (Greenwald, TPM's Josh Marshall, et al.) for coddling the establishment, and smacked by the right (The Corner, FOXNews, et al.) for showing their "liberal bias." Meanwhile, they have to get dragged kicking and screaming by the Marshalls and Politicos to the important (in Marshall's case) and frivolous (in Politico's) stories of the day.

With the speed of new media, what does Time provide? It should be a helpful compendium for those unwilling or unable to spend hours reading newsblogs and mainlining CNN, a week-in-review and week-ahead with analysis and opinion that makes an impact on our lives. That was the idea from the start, and that should still be the idea now. If anything, its mission should be even easier to accomplish... there's so much more news out there to collect, frame, and consider that the public would otherwise ignore. While CNN blathers into its 18th hour about the contents of Anna Nicole's fridge or which computer games the Virginia Tech murderer played, Time (CNN's partner in print) could provide something America desperately needs: a voice of calm authority on news stories and a powerful searchlight to shine on stories out of the limelight.

Whereas this goal is noble, the yearly Time100 has made a perversion of it, reducing important figures of the day into blurbs written by "ironic" or "fitting" authors (Petraeus by McCain, Dawkins by... Behe???). What makes its list any different than People's "Most Beautiful"? Obviously, no one is getting more or less beautiful (or at least, not by much) in one year. It's one thing to name the top 100 for a century (which Time did quite well, I think... despite their inclusion of Princess Di and the usual fluff). It's something else entirely to come out with a new list every year, as if people somehow lost influence in a year or gained it back. The conceit is so ridiculous that the results are bound to be loopy.

Stengel claims that he wants to emulate the Economist with Time. Which is all fine and dandy, I suppose (except that the Economist's readership is teeny and has no mass appeal). The Economist rightly calls itself a newspaper, and Time has a lot more magazine tools at its disposal. I know, I love the Economist's endless columns of text and wry wit, but Time provides the big picture, with easy-to-understand graphics and writing that unfolds briskly for someone plopping down on the chair at the dentists' office.

Time's whole reshuffle to "get back to basics" and bring in the old graybeards of the Beltway to replay the past is totally at odds with their reshuffle to jump into the electronic world with bloggers like Ana Marie Cox. I dunno, it just feels like Time's multiple personality disorder is starting to show in many ways, alienating the left, the right, and all the news junkies. When you pull a stunt like this, it's hard to get anybody back on board with you.

UPDATE: Here's just another example of the Time 100's pallid boring bullshit. As I mentioned, Michael Behe wrote Richard Dawkins' blurb. Predictably, it's colorless and fairly transparent. Yet, Behe has released the full text of what he wrote for Time, and notes that they added several phrases ("deeply unsettling to proponents of intelligent design" and the like). Just goes to show you how useless the Time100 is, and what an indicator of Time's current doldrums the list indicates.