Brian Williams hasn't been having a great year. So why did Time pick him as one of the 100 most influential people in the world? That's what some TV news insiders are wondering.

"How, exactly, does one become more influential when fewer people are watching you?" wonders one official from another news organization—not, incidentally, ABC, whose World News Tonight has beaten Williams's Nightly News in nine of the past 13 weeks. The official points out that Williams has long been a pet of Time editors, participating as a panelist in the magazine's Person of the Year luncheon for three years in a row. (Last time he even got to pick the winner!)

To hear former CNN president Walter Isaacson tell it, Williams "has been the perfect anchor for the new age ... because he did not try to reinvent the job. He realized there still was, and long will be, a place for a traditional journalist with an appreciation for hard news."

But that sounds less like an endorsement of Williams than a subtle dig at one of his rivals—though we can't imagine whom.

And while Katie Couric's slow-motion flameout at CBS has attracted all the headlines, TV news analyst Andrew Tyndall says Williams "is in deeper trouble than Couric."

On the other hand, is Katie fluent in Yiddish? We think not.

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