From Slate to 60 Minutes, Charles Kaiser rounds up this week's media winners and sinners

"The First Thing You Notice Is the Joy"

Winner: Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel, the most electric personality to light up the classical music scene since Leonard Bernstein. In the great tradition of 60 Minutes portraits of spectacular musicians (think Mike Wallace persuading Vladimir Horowitz to play Stars and Stripes Forever 30 years ago), Bob Simon did a splendid profile of the 27-year-old prodigy, whom Sir Simon Rattle called "the most astonishingly gifted conductor I have ever come across."

This piece helped 60 Minutes land in the Nielsen top 10 for the eighth time in nine weeks:

The New York Times had already anointed Dudamel last December with this profile and this review. Catch him in San Francisco or Los Angeles in March or April, when he gives six concerts in California and where he will soon helm the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Sinner: Charles McGrath tries to be provocative—but ends up getting everything wrong—when he asks the age-old neocon question, "Is PBS still necessary?" in the Times Arts & Leisure section. McGrath sees the network's small ratings as an argument for pulling the plug. Citing commercial announcements that now last up to 30 seconds, McGrath pretends that "Public television ... more and more resembles everything else on TV." Actually, the journalism on Frontline and the documentaries on American Experience (which McGrath never mentions) resemble nothing on commercial television, which abandoned 99 percent of its serious efforts decades ago. Yes, it's great to have 600 channels to choose from—and amazing how often it's impossible to find anything worth watching on any of them.

Winner: New York Governor Eliot Spitzer for his extraordinary op-ed piece in the Washington Post, which contains news that belongs on the front page of every newspaper in America. Spitzer reveals that not only did the Bush administration do nothing to prevent the subprime mortgage crisis; it actually "embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which the federal government was turning a blind eye." When predatory lending practices became so prevalent five years ago that attorneys general in all 50 states started to take action against the banks responsible for the crisis, for the first time in its history Bush used the federal Office of the Comptroller of the Currency as a tool against consumers.

The bottom line: "[T]he OCC invoked a clause from the 1863 National Bank Act to issue formal opinions preempting all state predatory lending laws, thereby rendering them inoperative. The OCC also promulgated new rules that prevented states from enforcing any of their own consumer protection laws against national banks. The federal government's actions were so egregious and so unprecedented that all 50 state attorneys general, and all 50 state banking superintendents, actively fought the new rules. But the unanimous opposition of the 50 states did not deter, or even slow, the Bush administration in its goal of protecting the banks." A gigantic scandal—and a perfect scandal for the Democrats to use against a former member of the "Keating Seven" in the fall.

Winners: The women of Mexico City, who the New York Times reported were being shielded from male gropers on some routes by the introduction of female-passenger-only buses. Men left stranded at bus stops were less enthusiastic about the experiment.

Sinner: For the second time in a month, Leon Wieseltier grasps for the mantle of crankiest old fart by repeating his attack on Barack Obama and pointing out that "being young again is also a way of living in the past." Wieseltier is dissatisfied because "I do not detect the hardness I seek" in the Democrat—presumably the same kind that has served us so magnificently during the current administration. As Rick Hertzberg (who happens to be Wieseltier's former boss) pointed out last year, "[I]t's much harder to damage your career [in Washington] by consistently supporting war and cruelty than by consistently supporting peace and love. The default position is 'bombs away.'" Someone should start by bombing Leon.

Winner: The Los Angeles Times for digging deeper into the administration's plan to shoot down a wayward satellite and finding an expert who doubted that the main purpose of the exercise was anything other than a test of an anti-satellite missile in space.

Winner: Jennifer Saranow's hilarious piece on online personal ad plagiarism in the Wall Street Journal. "These identity thieves don't want your money. They want your quirky sense of humor and your cool taste in music."

Winner: Jeffrey H. Birnbaum for a fascinating feature in the Washington Post magazine about the travel industry's failed attempt to convince the federal government to finance an ad campaign to attract foreign visitors to America. An enlightening look at the repellent, self-perpetuating lobbying process.

Winner: Stephen Metcalf for his piece in Slate about the disastrous Clemens hearings, which even Congressman Henry Waxman realized were a mistake the day after he held them. Metcalf includes this fine description of what makes the sports pages in the New York Post the finest in the city: It delivers exactly what the sports consumer most craves: rumor, innuendo, supposition, and scurrilous gossip. Above all, it delivers opinion—not with the white-glove judiciousness of the Gray Lady, but with the barstool surety of a delightful, irresponsible, and thoroughly knowledgeable drunk. Among the New York sports opinionati, the back page of the Post operates as a kind of final verdict. Is your favorite slugger a Boy Scout or a philanderer? A stalwart or a crybaby? A hero or a bum? We report; we decide.

Winner: Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose: Paul Kramer in the New Yorker, for a splendid piece on all the parallels between American intervention in Iraq and American intervention in the Philippines a century ago—including our use of water torture in both places.

Reporters: Thomas Rogers and Richard Vanderford

Seen Something? E-mail to alert me to anything you see that warrants high praise or high dudgeon.

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Charles Kaiser is the author of The Gay Metropolis and 1968 in America. He has been media editor for Newsweek, a member of the metro staff of the New York Times, and a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, where he covered the press and book publishing. To learn more, visit charleskaiser.com.