Time magazine picks Facebook founder, skips WikiLeaks' Assange

In a move that surprised many, New York-based Time magazine today chose Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg for its Person of the Year award, despite the fact that an overwhelming majority of its readers expected WikiLeaks’ controversial founder and editor-in-chief Julian Assange to be named as the Person of the Year.

Twenty-six-year-old Zuckerberg beat 39-year old Assange by virtue of the magazine’s policy that the editor-in-chief has the final say on who goes on the cover the magazine as the Person of the Year. Even as the magazine gave its final verdict, its online poll showed that Assange with 382,024 votes was well ahead of Zuckerberg who stood in the 10th position with 18,353 votes, or less than 5 per cent votes favouring Assange.

The online poll is not part of the selection process. It is only a gauge of who is the most popular candidate among the 25 names listed in the run-up to the final selection.

In what read like a defence for its choice, the magazine in its online version wrote: “Like two of our runners-up this year, Julian Assange and the Tea Party (a movement in the US), Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t have a whole lot of veneration for traditional authority. In a sense, Zuckerberg and Assange are two sides of the same coin. Both express a desire for openness and transparency. While Assange attacks big institutions and governments through involuntary transparency with the goal of disempowering them, Zuckerberg enables individuals to voluntarily share information with the idea of empowering them.”

The magazine’s London bureau chief Catherine Mayer, talking to Sky News, said that Time’s Person of the Year is not about popularity. In the past the magazine had chosen leader of Nazi Germany Adolf Hitler and Russian dictator Joseph Stalin for their influence on world affairs, she said.

“If Facebook were a country, it would be the third-largest country in the world.” Mayer said. Facebook today commands nearly half a billion users, and in a recent poll has also been voted as the best place to work.

Meanwhile, Assange continues to languish in London’s Wandsworth prison on charges of sexual assault on two Swedish women in August. Even though the Westminster Magistrate court here had given him a conditional bail on Tuesday, Swedish prosecutors opted to appeal against this bail that was set at £240,000. Assange’s lawyers expressed their disappointment and said this was “persecution and not prosecution”.

Time magazine’s representative in London brushed aside suggestions that reason for not choosing Assange was not due to the fear of taking on the US establishment and that it was not a political decision. Assange and WikiLeaks were earlier last week denied services by large US corporation like MasterCard and Visa, even though these companies have denied allegations that they did so under US government pressure.