“Nearly 40 Percent of Americans Have Never Heard of Anderson Cooper”

…That’s the headline on Huffington Post’s analysis of today’s Gallup figures: “CNN media darling Anderson Cooper falls a wee bit lower on this list, scoring a 43% favorable rating — but that’s okay, considering that 39% of those surveyed had actually never heard of him.”

Among respondents with opinions of each TV personality, Cooper has an 83 percent favorable and 17 percent unfavorable ranking. If Cooper is so favorable, why doesn’t that translate into ratings?…

> Update: 4:21pm: Keith Olbermann e-mails in defense of Cooper: “That Anderson’s got that low of an I-Never-Heard-Of-‘Em score after such a relatively short time on the national news scene should be the headline there. If you’ll notice, the lowest scores tend to be for people who’ve been around 20-30 years. It never ceases to amaze me how often people outside television news forget that you cannot turn somebody into a universally-recognized figure overnight, or even in just a few years — especially when that somebody appears on a cable entity.”