TIME magazine

I used to read Time magazine back in the '70s, and to a lesser extent in the '80s.  I'm ashamed of myself:  I had no taste back then! Time Magazine has always been the standard-bearer for middle- class semi-educated tendentiousness in America. (Read their "letters to the editor" section and watch who gets the last word!) What's most annoying about it is its favouritism, sometimes for rather loathsome people.

Consider President Nixon, around 1972.

It wasn't common for Time to name the same Man of the Year more than once, or to name more than one at the same time.  So why didn't they name Kissinger alone?  I imagine they wanted to feel they were presenting the "last word" on the 1972 election. (Unfortunately for them, there was this little matter of Watergate...) Speaking of Nixon, here's their  first two covers after Tricky Dick's resignation:

"The healing begins..." A note of wishful thinking there! I don't care for consecutive covers with the same subject, which they also did with Charles and Diana's 1981 wedding, Carl Lewis at the 1984 Olympics, and the GOP's 1980 Detroit convention:

Their serving as Ronald Reagan's spin doctor was particularly contemptible. Consider these covers in his crucial first year.

That last cover involved Reagan winning a Congressional vote on the Air Force AWACS system which wouldn't have been remarkable, except that there was talk he might suffer an embarrassing defeat.  And of course, there was this disingenuous 1986 cover:

Hmm, could worshipful press coverage have something to do with it?  

What's annoying is that they'll do cover stories like that just to reiterate what they've said before:  their favouritism isn't just shameless but repetitious! Like with Margaret Thatcher:

I like those flowers on the last cover, as if she'd been crowned Miss America!

And of course, they have their non-favourites:

Compare their cover on the 1980 Democratic convention with the two on its GOP counterpart!  I mention the Idi Amin cover because that headline "The wild man of Africa" always bothered me. It sounds like a sideshow attraction!

If you see a copy of Time magazine, burn it and flush the ashes down the toilet!