The Week’s Top 25 TV Pundits By Airtime

5. Tiki Barber – 575 On-Air Mentions

As a TV pundit, there are two ways to get a lot of mentions on the air. You can either break an important story or you can break up your marriage. Guess which one former football player and current NBC contributor Barber chose. Yep, the one that involves leaving your wife for an NBC intern. Fortunately for Barber, Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb over at Today helped stand up for him by pointing out that, even though he made some mistakes, he does still smell really good.

4. Dr. Nancy Snyderman – 864 On-Air Mentions

NBC’s resident doctor made a lot of good reports last week. She did a piece on how to avoid bad seasonal allergy affects and even travelled to Haiti to check up on progress. Both of those pieces we wholeheartedly support. Her piece on why plastic surgery might be good for children? Not so much.
You might be curious how Snyderman could get so high on the list, even getting her above her NBC friend Tiki while his intern scandal was blowing up. Well, it turns out that the health segments are some of the most teased segments of the entire day. Before NBC Nightly News airs Snyderman’s segment, they tease it at commercial breaks. But that’s not it. The local evening news on the affiliates tease it multiple times a few hours earlier. By the time the segment airs at 6:46, every single NBC channel has mentioned it (and therefore Snyderman’s name) at least three times. That’s a lot of mentions.
Of course, Snyderman wasn’t the only person who got helped out by the Tease Effect. Another doctor got helped out even more…

3. Dr. Jennifer Ashton – 874 On-Air Mentions

Take that, NBC’s resident doctor! CBS’ resident doctor totally kicked your ass and got to #3 on our list! Whoo! Of course, both of you ladies can comfort yourselves with the knowledge that you both destroyed CNN’s resident doctor. All the way at #15? Ha! What a loser.
In more specifics, Ashton got this high on our list with reports like the one she gave on a math formula that tells people exactly how many calories they need to cut to lose some weight. Of course, since Americans love eating and hate math, we can only assume that there will be rebellion soon and Ashton will be kicked so far out of the Top 25 that the ghost of Edward R. Murrow gets more airtime.

2. Karl Rove – 946 On-Air Mentions

Just look at this guy. Is that not the face of a TV star? Yep, our #2 spot goes to good ol’ Karl Rove who got to appear on Fox News quite a bit. Of course, that wasn’t the only area where he got to shine as the other networks continued talking about his new book, Courage and Consequence. We haven’t read the whole book yet because, to be honest, we’ve been waiting for those guys who parody Jane Austen books to come out with Courage and Consequence and Zombies. Hurry up, guys! It’s a guaranteed hit!

1. Sarah Palin – 3,445 On-Air Mentions

Well, who did you think it was gonna be? Everyone in the entire world loves to talk about Sarah Palin and, last week, they all continued to do so. The truth is that, even though she is a paid contributor to Fox News, her numerous on-air mentions have little to do with her specific television punditry. However, everyone talked about Sarah Palin. The Republicans, the Democrats, the Comedians talked about Sarah Palin. Even Tina Fey talked about being Sarah Palin. And, with the premiere of her new show on Fox News, even Sarah Palin got to talk about Sarah Palin. Sure, that show was a bit of a bust (it would have been so much better with that LL Cool J interview!), but that’s not going to hurt the Alaskan queen one bit. You all better get used to this part of the list, because we don’t think it’s going to change for a long, long time.

So, there you have it. That’s our list of the Top 25 TV Pundits for last week. It’s been a fun ride and one where we’ve all learned an important lesson about…Tiger Woods or something. Keep watching the news, everybody! Or don’t. While watching all the clips to research this, we kind of noticed it’s mostly all crap.