Putting together the most-influential list is easy: The President! Oprah! The President of someplace else! A person who appears on Oprah! And besides being easy journalistic lifting, it's also the best thing you can do for your career: you get to call powerful people and tell them how very powerful you think they are. Not only do you increase your chances of Steve Jobs' calling you back for a quote for your next article, but with journalism going the way it is, it's pretty comforting to know you can e-mail your résumé directly to Han Han.
But making a least-influential list, that's a fool's task — one that only a true journalist, a brave journalist, a handsome journalist would venture. Even the truest, bravest, handsomest journalist, however, has some trouble putting such a list together. First of all, the list I made (which you can read in full at time.com/leastinfluential) does not actually consist of the least influential people in the world. Those would be infants, people in comas and North Koreans who aren't Kim Jong Il. And it's not a list of those with the most negative influence: the underwear bomber, that tattooed chick who messed up Sandra Bullock's marriage, Jay Leno. My list is, technically, the Least Influential People Who Used to or Ought to Have Influence. Which also rules out those who simply had a bad year: Tiger Woods is still immensely influential, only now his influence lies in preventing men from texting their mistresses. None of Tiger's mistresses are on my list either, since they influenced fame-seeking sluts all over to make sure their famous boyfriends text them./.../
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