Apparently the “Sexiest Man Alive” is also Time Magazine’s Man of the Year, according to a new report by the Korean Central News Agency hailing their leader Kim Jong-un.
The young leader made headlines in recent days following a defiant rocket launch that successfully put a satellite into orbit and boosted Kim’s leadership, but North Korea’s state media failed to realize they were being duped by hackers and reported an online poll as fact, reports the Wall Street Journal. In fact, Time’s person of the year, announced today as Barack Obama, is not decided by poll but by its editors; this was merely a reader’s poll designed as a tie in with the main “prize”.
Kim Jong-un did rank first in Time magazine’s Person of the Year poll, with a little help from members of the 4Chan website who attached themselves to the vote and gave him 5.6 million votes.
“The US magazine The Time selected the dear respected Kim Jong-un as ‘man of 2012’,” the report from Korean Central News Agency read. “More than 5.6 million people, the greatest number, voted for Kim Jong-un”.
Last month, China’s Communist Party newspaper ran a story claiming Kim has been named 2012’s Sexiest Man Alive after it mistook a satirical report from US website The Onion.