The Three Media Figures Who Made It Onto Time’s ‘100 Most Influential’ List This Year
Three major media figures made it onto the annual Time 100 Most Influential People list this year.
Viral podcaster Joe Rogan, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO and President David Zaslav, and media mogul Oprah Winfrey all made the list of 100 most influential as the only 2022 honorees who are primarily in the media business.
Rogan is in the “Leaders” category of the list, in between Vice Premier of the People’s Republic of China Sun Chunlan, and President of the United States Joe Biden, along with other major figures like Russian President Vladimir Putin, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Both Oprah and Zaslav are under the Titans heading on the list, alongside Apple CEO Tim Cook, actress Michelle Yeoh, and matriarch of the Kardashian marketing empire Kris Jenner.
New York Times columnist and podcaster Kara Swisher delivered Joe Rogan‘s write-up. “I’m probably the very last person you might pick to assess the power and meaning of Joe Rogan,” she said, in noting that while they are very different in background and tone, those differences are “really the point of podcasting.”
It’s the new media landscape that, she writes, Rogan “has pioneered and plowed the fields like no other.”
She added:
He certainly delivers with big interviews from Elon Musk to Dave Chappelle, ranging across the ideological spectrum, which is a critical talent in these partisan times. But he’s also gotten into a lot of trouble this year for resurfaced racial slurs he made—and apologized for—and being a place where COVID deniers get a very easy ride. It’s complicated, of course, but there’s no question that Rogan’s success is pretty simple: the former Fear Factor host has become the nation’s earworm.
In their profile of Zaslav, Chip and Joanna Gaines of the Magnolia Network, which is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, wrote that their boss is “warm and kind and quickly became our friend.”
Describing him as “the titan next door,” and “the dealmaker,” they wrie that Zaslave is a “CEO’s CEO” whose name “can send chills down one’s spine.”
There’s something about the feeling David imparts when he believes in you, that has the ability to change circumstances. To change the outcome. To change you and the world for the better. And now, as he takes on the role of CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, that opportunity becomes even greater.
What we love most about David is how he loves his wife Pam and their beautiful family. He loves his work and the people he does that work with. David is a trailblazer but still grounded in what matters most. He’s a visionary who boldly predicts what’s ahead, but is the first to get behind other people’s dreams.
Oprah Winfrey’s profile was admiringly written by former First Lady Michelle Obama.
“Whether she’s talking to pop stars, Presidents, schoolgirls, scholars—or she’s asking you about your life over a glass of wine in the living room — Oprah has always had that uncanny ability to open us up, to hear beyond our words, and to uncover a higher truth, to be vulnerable with us in a way that allows us to be vulnerable back,” Obama wrote of the icon. “That’s her secret.”
Obama added:
But what I love most about Oprah is that she has never been content to keep it for herself.
When Oprah connects with something—a person, a book, a song, an idea—she makes sure to shine her light on it. She validates it. She anoints it. People know that when Oprah is involved, there is no pretense, no fluff—whether it’s her work in arts and media or her philanthropic work on health care, food equity, and more.
Obama said of Winfrey that, “no matter where you go, everyone knows her name.”
The full list can be seen here, from Time.
