> There is a perception among some people that the selection process is biased away from controversial figures
Its's more than a perception, they've tacitly admited it. Wikipedia:
As a result of the public backlash it received from the United States for naming the Khomeini as Man of the Year in 1979, Time has shied away from using figures that are controversial in the United States due to commercial reasons. Time's Person of the Year 2001, immediately following the September 11, 2001 attacks, was New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani, although the stated rules of selection, the individual or group of individuals who have had the biggest effect on the year's news, made Osama bin Laden a more likely choice. The issue that declared Giuliani the Person of the Year included an article that mentioned Time's earlier decision to elect the Ayatollah Khomeini and the 1999 rejection of Hitler as "Person of the Century". The article seemed to imply that Osama bin Laden was a stronger candidate than Giuliani, as Adolf Hitler was a stronger candidate than Albert Einstein.
It's kind of sad, really. Person Of The Year should not necessarily be a positive thing - just the most important person of the year. But we're long since past that now.
Well, the phrasing "X of the year" is almost always taken to mean "best X of the year". Consider "movie of the year," "book of the year," and so on. Probably they should have called it "Most Influential person of the year" to avoid the default fallback of "Best person of the year".
Decades ago, Time had enough credibility that their awarding "Man of the Year" was seen as an influential act. I don't know if it was Khomeni, economics, or what, but Time has driven their brand into the ground far enough that they are now awarding it to "gosh I hope so" recipients like the pope, similar to Obama's Nobel Peace Prize.
Going off-topic but IMO, I personally don't think of Hitler as more influential in changing the course of human history than Albert Einstein. The rise of fascism and Nazism, and the occurrence of WWII was a direct outcome of the results of WW I. I believe most of those events would have transpired, even if Hitler was at the helm or not.
It's a fair argument, and one that looks favourable to Einstein. As someone who did a Masters in Physics, I find that his theories were so counter-intuitive for the time that it would have taken decades or longer for them to be discovered by others without his input...
And if you attribute the existence of nuclear weapons to Einstein (a legacy he'd have been pretty unhappy about), that changed the world much more lastingly than Hitler did. Hell, it almost destroyed the world entirely. How's that for a legacy.
Its's more than a perception, they've tacitly admited it. Wikipedia:
As a result of the public backlash it received from the United States for naming the Khomeini as Man of the Year in 1979, Time has shied away from using figures that are controversial in the United States due to commercial reasons. Time's Person of the Year 2001, immediately following the September 11, 2001 attacks, was New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani, although the stated rules of selection, the individual or group of individuals who have had the biggest effect on the year's news, made Osama bin Laden a more likely choice. The issue that declared Giuliani the Person of the Year included an article that mentioned Time's earlier decision to elect the Ayatollah Khomeini and the 1999 rejection of Hitler as "Person of the Century". The article seemed to imply that Osama bin Laden was a stronger candidate than Giuliani, as Adolf Hitler was a stronger candidate than Albert Einstein.