By: Jesse Oxfeld Media darling Jon Stewart is -- surprise, surprise -- the clear leader in IWantMedia.com's annual "
Media Person of the Year" competition, set to be announced Sunday night on Tina Brown's CNBC talk show, at least if comments from voters are any guide.
Stewart racked up more complimentary voter comments than any of the 29 other candidates, including kudos from Kurt Andersen, Eric Alterman, Bonnie Fuller, and others.
Also popular among the commenters were Karl Rove, Howard Stern, and Tom Brokaw. Newspaper candidates, alas, trail even Janet Jackson and her famous breast. .
Interestingly, Mort Zuckerman, owner of New York's Daily News, picked Roger Ailes, chairman of the Fox News Channel, the corporate and ideological fellow traveler of the News' archrival New York Post. Zuckerman voted for the television impresario and former GOP operative "because of the extraordinary performance of Fox News in 2004, he said, "in which they challenged the broadcast networks for the first time." Zuckerman's high-priced gossip columnist, Lloyd Grove, picked likewise, saying Ailes' "creation, the Fox News Channel, might or might not be fair and balanced, but suddenly it's giving the broadcast networks a run for their ratings. Also, Roger is the only communications executive I'm aware of who once hurled an advertiser off a loading dock into a snow bank.?
Last year's winner was American Media's Bonnie Fuller, who narrowly edged out disgraced New York Timesman Jayson Blair.
Among this year's 30 candidates, nominated by IWantMedia's readers, are New York Times op-ed columnists Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd and Times public editor Daniel Okrent. Seymour Hersh is a nominee, presumably for his reporting on the Iraq war in The New Yorker this year, but the Pulitzer Prize he earned in 1970 will always keep him grandfathered in as a newspaper person. Also nominated is Murdoch, who, however exactly you chose to categorize him, does run what News Corporation's Web site calls "the world's leading publisher of English-language newspapers."
With five newspaper people among the 30 nominees, chances don't seem terribly slim for this ink-on-newsprint medium. But the
voter comments posted on IWantMedia.com clearly show momentum heading elsewhere.
Polling closed Sunday, Dec. 12, and the winner will be announced on CNBC's "Topic A with Tina Brown" at 8 p.m. ET this Sunday night, Dec. 19.
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