Power Grid Roundup: Diane Sawyer’s Up, Glenn Beck’s Flat — Or Is He?

For me, the biggest surprise in today’s Power Grid results didn’t come from the people who went up or went down in the ranks — it came from Glenn Beck staying in the same place, at least on TV. Beck is currently #10 in the TV Anchors/Hosts category. Beck dominated last week’s news cycle with attacks on Obama’s health care plan, daring stunts, and even art history lessons, and this past weekend, he successfully called for the head of Obama’s adviser Van Jones, who resigned over what seemed to be a small connection to the controversial “9/11 Truther” movement. So why did Beck stay in the same place?

Well, Beck’s buzz stats went as high as they can go: only Oprah beat him in blog buzz and news buzz, and he was #5 in news stories. The fact is, cable personalities often have a hard time competing with broadcast hosts like Oprah and Katie Couric, because even if they’re big on the Internet, cablers’ TV viewerships are usually much smaller. And a lot of Beck’s newsmaking influence was already ‘priced into’ his rank from last week; climbing to #10 had been a big shot up for him. Finally, Beck did climb to the #1 Radio Host slot, an impressive achievement given that #2 Rush Limbaugh is such a major force in talk radio today.

The real mover in the TV Anchor category was Diane Sawyer, who shot up from 25th place to 9th place on the news that she was replacing Charlie Gibson as the anchor of ABC’s World News. Even though Charlie’s a lame duck now, the news put his show in the spotlight and gave America his attenton. He went up from #7 to #3.

Less fortunate were the ladies of The View; Barbara Walters, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, and Sherri Shepherd each fell two spots, though Whoopi Goldberg remained the same and Joy Behar went up one. Why? The View has been coasting on summer reruns. Season 13 just started today, so they could be due for a comeback:



Be prepared for a huge resurgence by Jay Leno when The Jay Leno Show premieres on September 14th. Time Magazine, for its part, thinks the show will be “the future of television;” take that as you will.

In other categories: Bob Iger hit #1 in the TV Titans category thanks to Disney’s newsmaking acquisition of Marvel. Don Imus dropped from #15 to #9 among Radio Hosts after the buzz about his new Fox Business show wore off.

And Perez Hilton fell a spot, from #3 to #4, among Newspaper/Online Editors. He was overtaken by Washington Post editor John Geddes. Even in a celebrity-obsessed news cycle, it looks like good old-fashioned journalism wins some of the time.