Tony Abbott? Most Appalling Person of 2010?
Well you readers have spoken and that’s what you voted in overwhelming numbers in the annual Crikey Readers Choice Awards, and even though we were really tempted to rig it we didn’t.
So fine. There you go. But … yawn.
If we’re talking about expectations and exceeding or defying them, we politely suggest Abbott ain’t it for Most Appalling. After all, this is the man who made the Liberals electorally competitive when they were supposed to be doormats under the triumphant re-election of Labor … Sarah Palin was runner up with 24% of the vote, followed closely by faceless man and special friend of the US, Mark Arbib.
It’s no surprise that Julian Assange took out Crikey’s Person of the Year by such a whopping margin. Relatively unknown 12 months ago, a household name today. Shot out of the box in April with WikiLeaks’ release of Collateral Murder, by late November, just when we thought it was safe to slip into a summer coma after a monumental year of news, Assange and WikiLeaks gave the traditional news cycle the finger by dumping so much information on us it’ll take years to figure out what just happened … So yes, we’re with you on that trophy.
Aung San Suu Kyi for Person of the Decade? We thought you had more imagination than that.
George W Bush for the Platinum Arsehat is hard to argue with. On that score we say, congratulations sir, well deserved. Interesting that nominee Osama bin Laden seems to have scored lowest in that category… but who are we to judge?
It’s the Readers’ Choice after all, it’s just that we reserve the right to pick on your answers in the editorial. The cake? We have it, we eat it, we trample it into the carpet …
BP clearly reserved a special place in your hearts with twin wins — the coveted Maddoff for Most Spectacular Corporate Misadventure, and the University of East Anglia award for Most Significant Contribution to the Environment.
And we could quibble and say Justin Bieber ain’t a meme, but we’re not sure what a meme is anyway, and we suspect his hair might be one, so we’ll let that one go through to the keeper.
We can say this: 2010 has been … relentless, at Crikey we’ve felt very lucky to be in the eye of the hurricane, and with you lot along for the ride. Thanks for reading, and for giving us lip.
We’re all going to have a good lie down now, but we’ll be back publishing the Daily Mail on January 10, and in the meantime, our website will keep ticking over (not to mention Crikey‘s Cephalopods of Summer Series … see below.)
Happy end of 2010 … we made it. Just.
Well, Crikey, with a first-past-the-post voting system, what do you expect? An organisation that boasts the Poll Bludger, Possum and Charles Richardson should do better. Optional preferential next time, please!
And I’m still pissed that my nomination of James Hansen for Person of the Decade never even made the starting gates. For all that Aung San Suu Kyi is a worthy personage, what actual difference has she made?
If anything marks Crikey’s devolution into a left-wing talking shop preaching to the converted, it would be this editorial.
So Crikey’s readers are so hard left that they would vote Sarah Palin, a former US VP candidate from almost three years ago as their number 2 for ‘most appalling’, suggests that they are either obsessed with her, or ready to throw aside objectivity aside in the pursuit of partisanship.
There are far more desering candidates from both sides of local politics at both State and Federal level.
I can understand that given the personality of the readership who post here , but I expected something better from Crikey.
I subscribe for business reasons, to hear what’s happening inside politics, to get news faster than the mainstream media delivers. Instead I get partisan screeds that could have been written by either the Greens or the ALP.
I want Crikey to go back to the days when it was a must read, not a left-wing talking shop. The days when it was feared by both sides of politics for its ability to find out the truth and publish it first, free from the spin of either side.
You could make a good start by dumping Bernard Keane and getting Christian Kerr back, Kerr regularly broke stories on both sides of politics, instead Keane regurgitates too many media releases and calls it news.
I want what I paid for, C’mon Crikey, you can do better.
Once I’d wait for Crickey to pop up in the account each day. And I’d read it, thoroughly. Now it’s opened as an oversight , possibly 2/3 days later. Face book, You tube news, and independent journalist sites usurp it. And really, the comments and stories are predictable, and , well, after that editorial, your’e really ‘over’. Next.
Can’t help feel the Maddoff for Most Spectacular Corporate Misadventure should be called the Midgley.
Thomas Midgley who’s two most famous inventions was to put lead into petrol and develop CFC’s so we could put chlorofluorocarbons into refrigerators, and the ozone.