YMMV / TIME Magazine

• Magazine Decay:
  • As recently as the 1980s, it was primarily politics and current events (with one section covering entertainment in a similarly thoughtful manner), and arguably superior to The Economist in its heyday. While politics is still a big focus, celebrity gossip with sensationalist headlines is also featured now, along with fluffy media reviews and whatnot. The Onion skewered the dumbing-down of Time in their video feature "Time Announces New Version Of Magazine Aimed At Adults".
  • Time's annual Person of the Year award could be said to have undergone its own form of decay. The award wasn't originally meant as an honor, but was given to the person whom the magazine deemed to have had the most influence on that year's events, for good or for bad — it was given to Adolf Hitler in 1938, for example, and Josef Stalin in 1939 and 1942. The choices were often Americentric (every US President since FDR, apart from Gerald Ford, has won the award at least once), but that's a given for an American newsmagazine. However, the choice of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979 proved to be hugely controversial, as many readers were disgusted with the magazine for "honoring" an enemy of the United States (even though Person of the Year was never meant as an honor). Decay set in as Time stuck with safer choices from then on, such as giving it to Rudy Giuliani instead of Osama bin Laden in 2001 in order to avoid a similar backlash, which only reinforced the false perception that Person of the Year was meant as an honor. From there, recent years have brought such strange choices as "You" (representing the rise of the online community, with a reflective magazine cover) in 2006, as well as the creation of a hype machine around the award— the cover is now unveiled either on CNN or Today, as if they're naming the nominees for the Academy Awards. The magazine occasionally tries to return to a more impartial angle whenever an election year rolls around, as in most cases they generally pick whoever the newly-elected president is, regardless of their reputation. This did, however, result in controversy when Donald Trump was named Person of the Year in 2016 thanks to his electoral victory; after nearly four decades of cultivating an awards show-like image for the designation, the granting of it to Trump led many to mistake it for an endorsement. This even extended to Time's "Person of the Century" award at the turn of the millennium. While many thought Adolf Hitler would be the obvious objective pick for "most influential person" of the 20th century considering the impact of World War II on subsequent world events and social movements, Time deliberately chose the much safer option of Albert Einstein as the winner, justifying it by arguing that the 20th century was defined by science.
  • Time artificially darkened the mugshot photo of O. J. Simpson to make him seem scarier and were called out on it. Jon Stewart on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart declared it the Jumping the Shark moment for print media.
  • They also lost credibility after they published their (in)famous cover story "51%" (% of American women who aren't married), claiming it was the death of marriage now that the majority of women are choosing to remain single. The count included 15-year-olds and widows.
  • This collage compares Time's U.S. cover to its foreign covers, showing just how far that magazine has gone with regards to this trope. For example, Time 's Europe, Asia, and South Pacific cover story was the continued unrest in post-revolutionary Egypt. Its U.S. cover story? "Why Anxiety Is Good For You."
  • Time was being criticised as trivialising current affairs as long ago as 1936, in Wolcott Gibbs's New Yorker article "Time...Fortune...Life...Luce", which criticised the intellectual shallowness and social-climbing tendencies of its founder and editor Henry Luce, and brutally parodied the magazine's then-distinctive and eccentric house style (inverted sentence order; characterising subjects of articles by means of chains of breathless adjectives rather than critical analysis; uncritical admiration for the wealthy and famous; addiction to annoying neologisms like "cinemaddict" and "radiorator"). On Gibbs's account, the magazine can't have suffered from Magazine Decay because it was never very good to begin with.

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