Media Bias in Person-of-the Year Honors

     It is approaching the time of year when the media and others self righteously and pompously bestow their 2016 person-of-the-year awards. These awards reveal the media’s true values and provide a look deep into their arrogant, biased, progressive psyches. Following is an analysis of both international and local year-end awards.

    We begin with the Nobel Peace Prize. Since WWII there has been only one arguably conservative winner (Kissinger) out of nearly 100 recipients – a rate of 1%. Undeserving winners include: Red Cross, UNICEF, Amnesty International, Gorbachev, Arafat, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, UN IPCC, and Barack Obama. Manuel Santos won in 2016 for a treaty his countrymen soundly rejected; Alvaro Uribe, who brought FARC to the table, should have won. What about Ronald Reagan ending the Cold War?

     Time Magazine has anointed a person-of-the year since 1927. In 90 years there have been only 6 businessmen named –  a rate of 6.7%, or one every 15 years. Business has a greater and more direct impact on people’s lives than government. Among deserving honorees missing are: Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Elon Musk, Charles Schwab, Steve Jobs, Fred Smith, Sam Walton, Walt Disney, Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

      Local awards are even more outre. Our Central Florida newspaper bestows an annual award and I have a list of the recipients since 1983. For the past 33 years, there have been only three business people who won the award and they won mostly for reasons other than their business success – one won because his private development was for a purpose supported by the newspaper and the other two won primarily for their philanthropic activities. Some of the winners noted below truly are laughable.

• One winner founded an organization that has wrought considerable harm
• Many politicians and public employees won for simply doing their duty
• One politician won for passing a (totally unnecessary) tax increase
• Another person won for politicizing a respected non-political organization
• Someone won for donating a small portion of great inherited wealth

      I once had a friend fond of saying “whoever tooteth not his own horn, his horn goeth untooteth“. My final awards story is personal and inescapably involves tooting my own horn. In 1994 I founded the first school voucher program in Florida totally with private funds. We began by providing 250 scholarships to poor children from Central Florida and had another 2,500 on a wait list. Today that program funds 68,000 students at an annual cost of $300 million; overnight it transformed the school choice narrative. The paper was aware of our program, once giving it front page headlines.

      To my great surprise and consternation, I awoke one morning to read that the local paper had named an “Education Person of the Year“. The honoree was a two-bit liberal politician who had proposed an unneeded tax increase for schools which had zero percent chance of ever passing. Now – I don’t really care about such awards, but this one tells you everything you ever need to know about media bias and depravity.

      Year-end awards provide a bright spotlight into the dank, dark media psyche. Peace prizes, Time Magazine awards and local newspapers’ honors reveal their drossy values and their contempt for anyone that doesn’t imbibe the progressive Kool-Aid.