Time won’t give me time

When am I going to grow a spine and cancel my subscription to Time magazine? My major complaint is that over the years they’ve been subtly and gradually changing the tone to one that is less like reporting and more like advertising. I even got torqued up enough last September to send an email accusing one writer of being a shill for a business whose product he reviewed. In the offending “article,” which I don’t feel like identifying because it will just name the damn product another time, was about a new cell phone. After gushing about the phone itself, quoting the manufacturer’s own description of the phone, the writer actually advised buying it now rather than waiting for other providers to offer it because one “may never again find a monthly rate this good.” In this era of uber-crass commercialization, does this kind of plug bother only me? For what it’s worth, I did get a reply to my email, but it was not in any way apologetic and rather defended how cool he thought the phone was. So be warned: Time magazine now carries bought-and-paid-for ads, as well as masquerading-as-articles ads.

The latest misstep is, of course, the now infamous “Person of the Year” issue where it was Us, the DIY You-Tubers who lurve to use teh Internets as our new medium of navel-gazing. Far be it from me to ignore the irony of bitching about it on my blog (and of course I’m also a couple of weeks late and the Eye of the People has certainly moved on by now). But come on. Hugo Chavez, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong-Il, maybe someone involved in that Iraq thing going on, hell, even Vladimir Putin and his growing fondness for trying to bully the world through manipulation of the energy supply. I mean, do I matter even a tiny bit in the grand scheme of things in contrast to the aforementioned dudes? Sure, I love YouTube, sure I dig keeping up with the peeps blog-style. But it ain’t the most important shit that happened last year. Get some perspective, hmm?

So why do I continue to subscribe to this damn mag? Well, there’s certainly inertia at work. And they do a decent job in the front third of the mag to give me the lowdown on the week’s happenings. Hey, maybe I should just cancel until the 2008 presidential campaign starts to heat up. Uh—wait a second...