UPDATED "Where is My Vote?" (Part 2): TIME Snubs Green Movement as "Person of the Year"

UPDATE 0925 GMT: US National Public Radio is conducting a parallel poll, so far without throwing out "Iran Protesters".

President Obama is the Leader of the Others, with 2% of the vote. Yep, 2%. He's got a way to go to catch those pesky Protesters, who are on 93%.

United4Iran offers comments on the Time affair.

UPDATE 0800 GMT: Iran News Now has a spirited investigation of Time's poll and the dropping of "Iran's Protesters" from the final list for Person of the Year.

It may not rank with the alleged theft of June's Presidential election, but Time magazine just put itself in the role of vote-stealing villain for many supporters of Iran's Green Wave.

Yesterday Time put out the press release:

The seven finalists [for Time's Person of the Year] include Apple [Computers] CEO Steve Jobs, US Federal Reserve Charman [sic] Ben Bernanke, US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Jamaican Sprinter and Olympic Gold Medalist Usain Bolt, Commander of US Forces in Afghanistan General Stanley McChrystal and US President Barack Obama.

Also making the lists is "the Chinese worker," a group of people whom TIME says "are an increasingly influential group in one of the world's most powerful economies".

The Latest from Iran (15 November): The Path to Moharram

All credible candidates for the honour of the figure or group who has made a significant impact on the world in 2009 - except maybe the one whose claim is that he runs really, really fast. But the news is who didn't make the final cut from 10 nominees. Apparently "the Iranian People" didn't match up to an American Congresswoman, the man leading the US Long War in Central Asia, or the iPhone guy, let alone an assembly-line machinist in Beijing.

Still, even that rejection might have fluttered into cyber-space had it not been for Time's perverse tribute to democracy.

To boost attention to the award, the magazine held an on-line poll: the top US money-man Bernanke, for example, finished 6th with more than 63,000 votes; computer-whiz Jobs was 3rd with almost 87,000. (Bizarrely, given yesterday's outcome, Pelosi and "the Chinese worker" were not even among the nominees.) The runner-up in the vote was US President Barack Obama, who must be pleased with just under 112,000 endorsements.

But the winner in the poll? With 573,561 votes --- more than a 5:1 margin over Obama --- "Iran Protesters".

So how did Time achieve what Mahmoud Ahmadinejad cannot, making the Green Movement disappear after a supposedly full and fair election? Well, the magazine did put up the caveat, "TIME's editors reserve the right to disagree." And here is the likely explanation:

[While] their courage and determination in the face of a brutal government crackdown demonstrated the depth of their willingness to fight for what they believed in....any hopes that the protests would usher in a flowering of Iranian democracy were shattered by the violent reprisals. And as time went on, it became clear that opposition movement leaders like Mir-Hossein Mousavi were not seeking a clean break with the Islamic Republic, as many Western observers had hoped.

Sorry, folks, you were kinda cute, as well as kinda valiant, in the summer. You might even have spurred an outpouring of popular support as you persisted. But, for Time, your demonstrations no longer exist because you couldn't deliver a "regime change" winding the clock in Iran back to 1978.

Long live democracy. Go away, democracy.

Iran's 16 Azar: A Tribute to Activism, Video, & EA's Readers (Wall Street Journal)

A big hat-tip to all our readers, who feature in an article this morning by Christopher Rhoads in The Wall Street Journal, "Activists Skirt Web Crackdown to Reach the Outside World". Rhoads notes:

The intensifying crackdown on supporters and leaders of Iran's opposition, and the banning of foreign media from covering it, hasn't prevented a flood of online information about Iranian protests from reaching the world.

Video, still images and text messages posted on Facebook, Twitter, blogs and news Web sites Monday chronicled the latest antigovernment action, held largely at Iranian universities on what has historically been a protest day, National Student Day.

Rhoads mentions the efforts of activists such as Mehdi Saharkhiz ("onlymehdi") and Nikahang Kowsar, and he cites a specific incident on how "new media" relies on readers to cover important events despite Government restrictions and the fog of quick-moving developments:

Even video can be false or deceptive. A video posted Monday morning on foreign events blog enduringamerica.com, hosted by a University of Birmingham professor, showed someone burning a poster of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country's supreme leader, before a crowd of cheering people. Several readers thought the image was suspicious, in part because it didn't show the burning poster and the crowd in the same shot.

It also didn't appear to match other video taken at the university, said Scott Lucas, a professor of foreign policy at the university who started the blog.

"We consulted several people when the doubts arose," said Mr. Lucas, who added that it is possible backers of the regime make such videos to discredit the opposition. "We pulled it after it was up for about two hours."