Good news is all too rare these days, so when some comes down the pike, celebrations are in order. One of the shrillest and ugliest of all of the left’s propaganda organs, Time Magazine, gave us an early Christmas present on Tuesday when it announced that it was cutting not one, not two, but fully twenty-two staffers. Could the final closing of Time’s venerable doors be far behind? We can only hope.
The New York Post reported Tuesday that “Time chief executive [officer] Jessica Sibley said Tuesday that the company is slashing roles across several departments including editorial, technology, sales & marketing and Time Studios.” Oh, stop, stop, you’re breaking my heart. As the axe fell, Sibley mouthed the expected platitudes: the cuts had to be made in order to secure a “sustainable” future for the propaganda rag, which faces “significant challenges” including “heightened competition for decreased advertising budgets” and “drastic” changes in what people are looking for in a magazine.
Yeah, all that could be it. Or maybe people just don’t like the direction Time Magazine has taken. Time has in recent years become an even more relentless and obnoxious cheerleader for the hard left than MSNBC, the Washington Post, or any other establishment media organ.
Unlike some other establishment publications that still like to pretend that they’re unbiased sources for news, Time’s bias has been naked, open, and unapologetic. It ran a series of covers featuring Donald Trump melting (twice), painting himself into a corner, barely keeping his head above water in a flooded Oval Office, melding into Vladimir Putin, heartlessly facing down a crying Hispanic child (presumably at the Southern border), and on and drearily on.
On the other side of this crude propaganda was the magazine’s Soviet-style cover for its Aug. 26 issue, featuring Kamala Harris looking confident and resolute, her head tilted slightly upward as she looked calmly into a future that contained no challenges she could not overcome. The caption: “Her Moment.” This image could hang in Tiananmen Square right next to the big picture of Chairman Mao and no one would bat an eye.
The Post notes that Time was “under fire earlier this month for its fawning cover story featuring Vice President Kamala Harris, despite her refusing an interview with the publication. Conservatives ripped the piece over the absence of Harris’ voice and the vice president’s opaque policy agenda.” The worst of it, however, was the cover image, which was emotional manipulation at its most obvious and clumsy.
All this represents a steep decline from what Time magazine once was. Founded in 1923, it was once a significant cultural voice. To be named Time’s Man of the Year, before it became “Person of the Year,” was once widely considered an actual honor, although even in its early years, the magazine emphasized that the distinction was given not to the best person of the year, but the most noteworthy: Adolf Hitler was Man of the Year in 1938, and Joseph Stalin in 1939 and 1942. In an indication of how profoundly unserious Time has become, the last Person of the Year was Taylor Swift.
Related: Media Response to Harris’ Appropriation of a Trump Proposal Revealed More Than Just Bias
The pages of Time used to be filled with the work of actual great writers, rather than today’s crop of semi-literate leftist hacks and press release writers. For nine years (from 1939 to 1948), one of the most profound and eloquent writers of the twentieth century, the heroic anti-Communist Whittaker Chambers, was a Time staffer.
The magazine had its finger on the pulse not just of the entire spectrum of American politics but of the culture as well, and the magazine celebrated great art, music, and literature. In the mid-twentieth century, a subscription to Time was an easy way to get up to speed on all the major political, cultural, and artistic currents in an America that had not yet lost its way.
Those days are long gone. Sibley stated that Time is “making changes now across our business to protect against this period of transformation and unpredictability in the media industry.” She added that “the cuts will impact several departments, including editorial.” Amid all this, however, one thing is certain: Time’s downward spiral will not lead it to reconsider its role as far-left propaganda churned out for long waits in the dentist’s office. Neither Sibley nor anyone else at Time will dare to suggest even trying to return to the glory days when the magazine’s political slant was not so obvious and when it actually tried to make its readers think, rather than manipulating them into not doing so.
Will Time ultimately close? It would be a blessing for the nation.
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