This story caught my eye because Rachel Maddow, who certainly deserves to be at the top of the mountain, is 1) brilliant; 2) is “family” (woohoo), and 3) a relatively “new” media figure compared to the other veteran progressive media types making Alternet’s list. It looks like the eds were surprised as well:

It’s no surprise that Moyers, the moral sage, and Moore, the rabble-rouser, are ranked at the top. They have been popular with AlterNet readers for years. Moyers’ current show, “Bill Moyers’ Journal,” gets at the heart of our many social ills with long-form exploration and probing interviews. Recently, Moyers spent an episode on the Lyndon Johnson Vietnam tapes, drawing a connection to Obama’s escalation of the war in Afghanistan. The show was a television masterpiece.

…[Michael] Moore also had the highest recognition score in the survey at 98.4 percent — quite a feat for the former editor of the Flint, Michigan alternative weekly The Flint Voice. Moyers was next at 96.4, followed by Arianna Huffington at 95.6.

But the big story in the survey is Rachel Maddow. For her to leapfrog legends like Noam Chomsky, Arianna Huffington and Amy Goodman — longtime media mainstays — is a huge accomplishment. Maddow’s success demonstrates that brains and savvy have a place on cable TV, amidst the name-calling that sometimes passes for dialogue. And it indicates that progressives will follow the right talent to corporate media, which may encourage mainstream media outlets to hire more progressives.

Readers were asked to respond to this question: How Influential are the following progressive media figures? The options were: Very influential, Somewhat influential, Not Very influential and Who? The rankings for this article came from the highest percentage of respondents who chose “very influential.” The recognition score was the percentage of people who recognized the media figure.

Where are the bloggers, those lefty, Cheetos-stained, pajama-wearing, basement-dwelling keyboard jockeys? A couple of powerhouse ones managed to pull themselves up onto this list:

In fact, you have to slide down to numbers 19 and 20 on the list — blogger Markos Moulitsas, founder of the Daily Kos, and Glen[n] Greenwald, Salon.com’s super blogger — to find the first Internet-created stars. One possible explanation for this is that the AlterNet audience, like audiences for virtually all high-traffic Web sites, magazines and blogs, is majority white, male and boomer-leaning, and consequently less influenced by the Internet, and more by a range of media, including the New York Times, books and television. (Interestingly, Moulitsas and Glenn Greenwald had relatively low recognition scores at 59.1 and 61.1, respectively.)

So I click to read the second page of the article, make my way down and then see this chart at the bottom:

(click for larger version)

More progressive media figures who scored in the rankings (in alphabetical order): Max Blumenthal, Digby, Laura Flanders, Bill Greider, Jane Hamsher, Melissa Harris-Lacewell, Van Jones, Roberto Lovato, Joshua Marshall, Ron Reagan, Randy Rhodes, Tavis Smiley, Pam Spaulding, Jessica Valenti, Joan Walsh, Patricia Williams