President Donald Trump said on Friday that he took a pass when he was contacted by Time about potentially being named “Person of the Year.”
Trump said his team was contacted by the publication saying that he was probably going to be featured in the magazine.
“Time Magazine called to say that I was PROBABLY going to be named “Man (Person) of the Year,” like last year, but I would have to agree to an interview and a major photo shoot,” Trump wrote in a tweet.
“I said probably is no good and took a pass. Thanks anyway!” he wrote.
Time declared Trump “Person of the Year” in 2016 after he won the presidential elections over his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton.
In response to Trump’s tweet, Time said on Twitter that the magazine “does not comment on our choice until publication.”
The first “Man of the Year” issue was published by Time in 1927. It was published as a stopgap because editors realized they had not put Charles Lindbergh on Time’s cover. According to Time, the editors believed they could still put him on the cover months after his historic flight in May by calling him “Man of the Year.”
The criterion that the magazine uses is “the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or ill, and embodied what was important about the year.”
Trump has frequently called out media organizations for their biased reporting against him—something which might have played part in his decision to decline the Time magazine interview.
The research, published in October, shows that only 5 percent of media reporting during that period was positive. Sixty-two percent of the stories were negative, and 33 percent were neither positive nor negative.
By comparison, coverage of President Barack Obama during the same time period was 42 percent positive and 20 percent negative. For President George W. Bush, the number was 22 percent positive and 28 percent negative. And for President Bill Clinton, it was 27 percent positive and 28 percent negative.
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