- This year, Time magazine has chosen “The Guardians,” a group of journalists who have been targeted for their work, as Person of the Year. Time magazine has published a series of four black-and-white covers highlights what the magazine calls “the War on Truth.”
- The Guardian group includes Jamal Khashoggi, Saudi journalist who was murdered in October 2018 at his country’s Istanbul consulate. This is the first time that a Person of the Year is a deceased person.
- Another cover features Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, two Reuters journalists who were arrested one year ago in Myanmar while they were working on stories about the killings of Rohingya Muslims, a minority population in Myanmar’s Rakhine state. The two men remain behind bars. Their wives were photographed for the cover.
- “The Guardians” also includes the journalists at the Capital Gazette, the Annapolis, Maryland newspaper where five employees were murdered by a gunman last June.
- And the fourth cover shows Maria Ressa, chief executive of the Philippine news website Rappler. She was indicted last month on tax evasion charges — a case that free speech and civil liberties advocates have warned is part of a wider crackdown on dissent by Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s administration.
