Posted on 12/22/2002 3:35:21 AM PST by kattracks
NEW YORK, Dec 22, 2002 (AP Online via COMTEX) -- The FBI agent who wrote a scathing memo on FBI intelligence failures and women who blew the whistle on corruption at corporate giants Enron and WorldCom were named Sunday as Time magazine's Persons of the Year.
The magazine's editors chose Coleen Rowley, Cynthia Cooper and Sherron Watkins "for believing - really believing - that the truth is one thing that must not be moved off the books, and for stepping in to make sure that it wasn't."
Time managing editor Jim Kelly said the women embody a critical struggle facing the country - how to restore trust in disgraced institutions, from major corporations to the Catholic Church.
"It's their modesty that's so becoming," Kelly told The Associated Press. "All three are just resolute in standing up for what is right. All three of them are made of very strong character."
Rowley, 48, wrote a letter to FBI Director Robert Mueller in May criticizing the agency for ignoring evidence before Sept. 11, 2001, that hinted of an attack. She later told the Senate that the FBI was mired in bureaucracy and "careerism."
Cooper, 38, a WorldCom internal auditor, alerted the company's board in June to $3.8 billion in accounting irregularities. A month later, the telecommunications giant declared the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history.
Watkins, 43, sent memos in August 2001 warning Enron chairman Kenneth Lay that improper accounting could cause the company to collapse. The company later filed for bankruptcy, and Watkins resigned as a vice president last month.
Time's cover story on the three women compares them with Sept. 11 firefighters as heroes chosen by circumstance.
"They were people who did right just by doing their jobs rightly - which means ferociously, with eyes open and with the bravery the rest of us always hope we have and may never know if we do," the magazine writes.
Last year, Time editors selected then-New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani for leading the city's response to the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Critics suggested Osama bin Laden should have been the pick as the year's top newsmaker.
The 2002 picks are unusual because the vast majority of the magazine's Persons of the Year have been long-established public figures - world leaders, war heroes, corporate chiefs.
In an interview with Time editors, Rowley, Cooper and Watkins - nationally unknown before this year - said some colleagues now hate them for shedding light on the mistakes of their superiors.
"There is a price to be paid," Cooper said. "There have been times that I could not stop crying."
The magazine's Persons of the Year package includes profiles of the women and a joint interview of the three, conducted earlier this month. The issue hits newsstands Monday.
---
On the Net:
Time magazine: http://www.time.com
By ERIN McCLAM Associated Press Writer
Copyright 2002 Associated Press, All rights reserved
Oh, way less than 5%. I would say less than half-a-percent. But thanks to Time, the recognition factor for these ladies will skyrocket to.... less than 1%.
I trust The Enquirer more than I trust Time. No kidding.
If you are waiting in your dentist's office one day and you look at the magazines laying around and, lo and behold!, you notice that Time is still being published! But right next to the Time magazine is an Enquirer.... which one are you going to pick up?
I never touch Time Magazine: Brain fart of the printed media!
Because of the success of the American economic system, the U.S. rolled through 1955 in two-toned splendor to an alltime crest of prosperity, heralded around the world. Much of this prosperity was directly attributable to the manufacture and sale of that quintessential American product, the automobile. Some 8,000,000 of them were produced and sold, and a good half of them were made and marketed by General Motors under the direction of President Harlow Herbert Curtice--the Man of the Year.Real profits, not funny money and demented accounting.Yet this production alone would not make Harlow Herbert Curtice, 62, the Man of the Year. Nor would the fact that he is president of the world's biggest manufacturing corporation--and the first president of a corporation--and the first president of a corporation to make more than $1 billion in net profits in a year.
And just watch 'em in 2003!
Why wasn't Goldberg on the cover of Time?!?
P. S. The only reason The Economist has avoided this trap is (let me clear my throat -- ahem -- now) BILL GATES READS IT (there), and the lemming-like CEOs who can afford it are therefore convinced it MUST be brain food. Too often it's just well-written conventional wisdom with an attitude.
Barbara Olsen would have been great next to Linda Tripp and Gary Aldrich or Bernard Goldberg , but the award is only given to the living.
There's always Temperlake and Triplett, who wrote Year of the Rat.
Isn't that the truth. Oh do I know...
President Bush strode like a collosus through these last three years, and whether fate has triumph or tragedy ahead, or both, he will dominate the history of this new era.
Just this year while continuing the war on terror he canceled the ABM treaty with hardly a peep from Russia, told the UN it would be irrelevant if it didn't deal with Iraq followed by a 15-0 approval vote in the Security Council, won control of the Senate for his party against historical odds, pushed through the greatest reorganization of the executive branch in half a century, and then ending the year by ordering smallpox vaccination for the troops while taking one himself and neatly sidestepping the Lott controversy with a stern statement of his own and the probable installment of his ally, Senator Frist as Majority Leader tomorrow.
If Time wanted a copout that would sell magazines and be read in the future, they could have gone with Team Bush, and given the credit to Powell, Rove, Rice, Cheney, but even that evidentally caused too much anguished squealing among the liberal pigs.
LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL!!!!!
Okay, but Americans have no idea who they are. This award of yours is piece of $hit, apparently.
I did not really know who they were until I read about it.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.