Time Magazine’s person — or, once again, persons — of the year has a unique distinction: it’s being granted for the first time in part to deceased honorees.

Slain journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist, and staffers at the Maryland daily Capital Gazette, the five who were gunned down in their newsroom and their colleagues who kept reporting that day’s events, have been given Time’s designation as “The Guardians.”

The publication said its Person of the Year honor this year recognizes those “who have taken great risks in pursuit of greater truths.”

Filipina journalist and media firm Rappler’s chief executive Maria Ressa, working as authoritarian Rodrigo Duterte remains in power, and Reuters correspondents Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, detained in Myanmar, are included as Time’s “Guardians.” As are other noted examples from Sudan to Brazil, all detailed in the Time article.

The execution of Khashoggi, at a Saudi consulate in Turkey in October, has filtered into oil markets US:CLF9 and even the stock market at times, as well as ongoing news coverage of the Trump White House, including the relationship between Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman and Jared Kushner.

“Every detail of Jamal Khashoggi’s killing made it a sensation: the time stamp on the surveillance video that captured the Saudi journalist entering his country’s Istanbul consulate on Oct. 2; the taxiway images of the private jets bearing his assassins; the bone saw; the reports of his final words, ‘I can’t breathe,’ recorded on audio as the life was choked from him,” Time wrote.

Time

“As we looked at the choices, it became clear that the manipulation and abuse of truth is really the common thread in so many of this year’s major stories from Russia to Riyadh to Silicon Valley,” Time editor in chief Edward Felsenthal said on the “Today” show.

The choice wasn’t without criticism, with some pointing to the shift toward group or trend winners over a singular figure.

“In 2001, the magazine selected Rudy Giuliani over Osama bin Laden, demonstrating that they were willing to bend the rules to avoid offense, controversy, and/or bad newsstand sales,” a National Review commentator wrote Monday as the shortlist was issued. “The modern criteria is a little fuzzier — it’s now an important figure or group that symbolized a story or trend that dominated the news, that is likely to sell a lot of copies.”

Last year, the magazine’s editors selected the Silence Breakers, those who were credited with sparking a national reckoning over the prevalence of sexual harassment and assault.

President Trump, the 2016 Time winner, was a runner-up this year. So was Robert Mueller, the special counsel who is investigating the Trump campaign and who serves as a near-daily target of the president’s tweeting.

The Time shortlist also included Russian President Vladimir Putin, a Time winner a decade ago; Christine Blasey Ford, who accused in front of Congress and the cameras the now-confirmed Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, which he denies.

Other 2018 candidates included South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in, voted into office after the corruption scandals that plagued his predecessor and who brokered the Trump meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un; Ryan Coogler, the writer and director, whose blockbuster “Black Panther” landed the empowering “Wakanda forever!” in the cultural lexicon; and Meghan Markle, the previously married American actress who wed Britain’s Prince Harry this year.

Read:Wakanda forever: The overt feminism of ‘Black Panther’

David Hogg, a student at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, site of a February mass shooting which left 17 people dead in Parkland, Fla., thrusts his fist in the air as he speaks during the "March for Our Lives" event demanding gun control. Reuters

This year’s group distinction could have been given to families separated at the U.S.’s southern border, the Time shortlist indicated. At the height of a summertime border crisis, thousands of children were split from their parents after being caught trying to illegally cross from Mexico to the U.S., although some were pursuing asylum. Immigration officials held children in warehouse-like conditions, as part of a controversial Trump administration “zero-tolerance policy” that was later adjusted by executive order. Also in contention for the Time cover: the March for Our Lives young activists, who target policy change around gun violence in the wake of the Valentine’s Day mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas school in Parkland, Fla.

Okoye (Danai Gurira), Nakia (Lupita Nyong'o) and Ayo (Florence Kasumba) in Ryan Coogler’s “Black Panther.” Marvel Studios

The Time designation has been awarded every year since 1927 and once was bestowed upon Adolf Hitler.

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