You’ve seen endless consideration given to Sarah Palin‘s Going Rogue and heard debates about health care lasting well into the weekend (even at nighttime!), and if you have spent any time at all on this very site, then you’ve seen tons of analysis of that very concentrated news coverage. To be frank, it’s all very exhausting. But the effects of these stories have a reach that extends well into the media world, even tickling the Mediaite Power Grid, leading to a little bit of rearrangement.

The passage of the health care reform bill in the House of Representatives and the beginnings of debate in the Senate have proven to be huge stories for MSNBC’s Kelly O’Donnell in the TV Reporter category, as she launched from #54 to #6, trailing the football-fueled Erin Andrews by only one spot, as she hopped from #13 to #5. The Congressional news has also provided a boon for the Washington Post‘s Dana Milbank who inched from #3 to #2 among Print/Online Reporters on the strength and prevalence of his D.C. coverage.

National news also aided Fox News’ Major Garrett as he moved from #24 to #10 among TV Reporters on the buzz of his interview with President Obama. Elsewhere, Malcolm Gladwell‘s latest book release — a collection of his New Yorker articles — took him from #5 to #3 among the Print/Online Columnists, bad reviews be damned.

And then there’s Sarah Palin and Going Rogue – never a dull moment there. Newsweek‘s Jon Meacham held on to his #1 among Magazine Editors, keeping away from constant Power Grid rival Anna Wintour of Vogue. Let’s just say the controversial Runner’s World Palin cover might have played a role, keeping Meacham’s name all over your news. Certified Palin-hater and baby-questioner Andrew Sullivan also experienced a bump, moving from #6 to #4 among TV Pundits, not too far in front of Meghan McCain, who jumped from #40 to #12, and has never been shy about Palin in politics, never shying from the I-am-woman angle.

It’s getting to the point where you have to ask yourself: Will these stories ever die? We’ll find out next week here on the Power Grid.

In the piece, Pinker was measured in his praise of Gladwell as a master essayist, “dilettante” and “writer of many gifts,” but the reviewer was also deliberate in his criticisms, dissection The Problem With Gladwell, which he dubbed “the Igon Value Problem” — a jab at a spelling mistake repeated through Gladwell’s book, used to demonstrate Gladwell’s lack of knowledge in an area he writes extensively about (in this case, linear algebra). Pinker:

[W]hen a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.

… The banalities come from a gimmick that can be called the Straw We. First Gladwell disarmingly includes himself and the reader in a dubious consensus … He then knocks it down with an ambiguous observation, such as that “risks are not easily manageable, accidents are not easily preventable.”

Eventually comes the big wrap-up and summarization of larger points:

The common thread in Gladwell’s writing is a kind of populism, which seeks to undermine the ideals of talent, intelligence and analytical prowess in favor of luck, opportunity, experience and intuition. For an apolitical writer like Gladwell, this has the advantage of appealing both to the Horatio Alger right and to the egalitarian left. Unfortunately he wildly overstates his empirical case.

It stings, a bit. But Gladwell is a relatively good sport, taking to his personal website to respond with his hopefully soon-to-be-published letter to the editor. (How quaint!):

“It is always a pleasure to be reviewed by someone as accomplished as Stephen Pinker,” he writes, “even if—in his comments on “What the Dog Saw” (Nov. 15)—he is unhappy with my spelling (rightly!) and with the fact that I have not joined him on the lonely ice floe of IQ fundamentalism.” Fair and fun jab, no?

Then, Gladwell reveals that he emailed Pinker over a factual quibble relating to quarterbacks in the NFL (!), and Pinker was kind enough to respond with his sources, which included a racist marketing specialist (not John Madden), a blog post (not John Madden) and a fantasy football study (not John Madden!), all of which is to say, Malcolm Gladwell knows more about football than you do. And if you don’t like his book, you might be a racist.

Pinker’s review is here, while Gladwell’s spicy and polite rebuttal is here.

(photo via Todd Heisler/The New York Times)