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There was a time in America when the three broadcast television networks enjoyed a monopoly and the major newspapers such as the Washington Post and the New York Times were extremely powerful. During that time, weekly magazines were also popular and considered must reading.

For decades, Time Magazine was quite influential in our country. Every year, the magazine would award their “Man of the Year” or “Woman of the Year.”

Readers truly looked forward to this year-end announcement, probably not realizing the left-wing tilt of the magazine. As evidence, the award winners have often been Democrat presidents like Harry Truman, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Lyndon Johnson, who each won the award twice and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who won three times. In addition, John F. Kennedy, and Jimmy Carter both won the award once.

Time Magazine has also made some very questionable decisions and bestowed the award to genocidal dictators like Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin, who won twice, as well as religious zealots like Ruhollah Khomeini. The award has also been given to hardened communist dictators like Nikita Khrushchev, Yuri Andropov, and Deng Xiaoping who won twice.

Eventually, Time Magazine adopted the title of “Person of the Year” for their award, bowing to pressure from the forces of political correctness.

In recent years, Time Magazine has become even more progressive as its readership has dwindled. The 2019 “Person of the Year” was young environmental activist and climate crusader Greta Thunberg. This choice certainly pleased the liberal elitists, while having little impact on average Americans who were probably either unaware or unimpressed by her activism.

For 2020, the award was given to both former vice president Joe Biden and his running mate, U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.). This is the first award given to a party’s presidential and vice-presidential ticket.

The choice did not impress many media critics. Fox News contributor Joe Concha called the selection “laughable” and said that they were chosen “because that was the politically correct thing to do and because it’s what their readers wanted from a comfort food perspective.” Concha believed that the country’s courageous healthcare workers providing treatment to COVID-19 patients deserved the award instead.

Time Magazine could have chosen the pharmaceutical company executives who oversaw the development of COVID-19 vaccines, the members of the Coronavirus Task Force or especially President Donald Trump. He was the one who provided the leadership for Operation Warp Speed that spurred the development of the fastest vaccine production in the history of the world.

Instead of distinguished award recipients, the magazine chose to engage in left-wing politics. The editors claimed the winners were worthy because they served as a major contrast to President Trump. According to Editor-in-Chief Edward Felsenthal, the pair was chosen for “changing the American story, for showing that the forces of empathy are greater than the furies of division, for sharing a vision of healing in a grieving world.”

This justification is ridiculous, for Biden is a 50-year politician, who has become a puppet of the far-left. While President Trump was forging peace deals and leading a tremendous economic recovery, Biden spent most of the presidential campaign hiding in his basement. His running mate ran a horrible presidential campaign and was unimpressive in her stint as a candidate for vice-president.

Neither of these partisan Democrats showed any ability to heal America or bridge the political divide. While pushing a far-left agenda including a modified Green New Deal, tax increases, supporting the Paris Climate Accord, resuming the Iranian nuclear deal and granting amnesty for illegal aliens, neither Biden nor Harris expressed any “empathy” for middle-class Americans who are struggling through this epidemic. In fact, Biden and Harris want to extend the COVID-19 lockdown and make economic conditions even more difficult for average Americans.

This choice shows the type of arrogance that exists at Time Magazine. Fortunately, Americans are deserting Time Magazine, just like the other established liberal media outlets in print, broadcast television and cable television. In the last few years, the magazine’s print circulation has dropped significantly. By June of 2018, it had fallen to 2.3 million, an amazing 33-percent loss in just one year.

Surely, this loss of influence for Time Magazine will continue for the foreseeable future. Hopefully, Americans will continue to demand more media diversity and reward outlets that publish objective information, as opposed to progressive talking points.

The heyday for the traditional forms of the liberal media — such as the magazines, newspapers, broadcast networks and even cable news networks — is over. This is an incredibly positive development as the bias of the traditional media is overwhelming and cannot be ignored.

For several years, the liberal bias has been thoroughly documented by the Media Research Center, which regularly monitors the evening news programs of the three major broadcast networks. During the 2020 presidential election, the coverage of President Trump was 92-percent negative, while the coverage of former Vice President Biden was incredibly soft and mostly positive.

If Biden becomes our next president, the softball media coverage will certainly persist. To the liberal media, Biden is their “Person of the Year,” while Trump is clearly their enemy. Hopefully, this outrageous double standard will result in ratings that continue to plummet and influence that continues to diminish as Americans reject media entities that have no regard for the truth.

Jeff Crouere is the host of “Ringside Politics,” which airs at 7:30 p.m. Friday and 10 p.m. Sunday on WLAE-TV 32, a PBS station, and 7 a.m. till 11 a.m. weekdays on WGSO 990 AM in New Orleans and the Northshore. He is the political analyst for WGNO-TV ABC 26 and a columnist for selected publications. For more information, visit his web site at RingsidePolitics.com. E-mail him at jeff@ringsidepolitics.com.