From Howie Kurtz to Ashley Dupré, Charles Kaiser rounds up this week's media winners and sinners

Winner: The indispensable Bill Moyers. Last week on his PBS Journal, Moyers managed to highlight half a dozen of the Bush administration's greatest hits in just one hour. Among them:

A new American embassy in Baghdad, partly built by kidnapped slave labor, has already cost $700 million and is nowhere near being occupied. There are $18 billion in missing funds in Iraq, presumed to have ended up in the pockets of corrupt Iraqi officials. Radhi Hamza al-Radhi, the Iraqi judge appointed by the United States who made that discovery, testified before Congress that 31 members of his staff had been assassinated when they tried to figure out exactly who had stolen that money.

After eight letters and a subpoena, Condi Rice finally appeared before Congressman Henry Waxman's oversight committee and acknowledged that she was aware of that testimony, but insisted that this was mostly a matter "of invoices and records that were not solid enough for us to be confident that the goods and services were being billed properly."

Back in America, General Services administrator Lurita Doan, who manages $500 billion in federal funds, improperly awarded contracts without competitive bidding, and allowed Karl Rove's White House deputy to brief her staff on how the GSA could be used for political purposes. Doan herself asked her staff, "How can we use GSA to help our candidates in the next election?" Doan testified that she "honestly and absolutely" had no "recollection of actually saying that." (Surprise!)

All of these revelations were the result of the work of Congressman Henry Waxman's oversight committee. At the end of the show, I finally understood the signature achievement of the Bush administration: They have created a regime in Iraq that is a perfect mirror image of their own—a government as corrupt and incompetent as any in the modern history of either country.

Winner: The sublime Russell Baker. After many decades as the funniest and the most serious columnist at the New York Times, Baker continues with a magnificent second act at the New York Review of Books, which also happens to be the best magazine in America. [Ed. Besides National Magazine Award nominee for General Excellence Radar magazine, of course.] Baker's latest piece is a brilliant portrait of Condi Rice's disastrous tenure in the two most powerful foreign policy positions in the Bush administration. Baker draws many of his facts from Elisabeth Bumiller's new biography, Condoleezza Rice: An American Life, which Baker praises as a great achievement.

(Photo: Getty Images)

Sinners: All of the reporters who decided the most important thing about Barack Obama's landmark speech about race was the number of lines from it that could be used in Republican attack ads, instead of praising him for delivering one of the most sophisticated and courageous political speeches of modern times.

Winners: The editorial writers of the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and especially the New York Times, for giving Obama exactly the credit he deserves. In the words of Andy Rosenthal of the New York Times, "It is hard to imagine how he could have handled it better."

Winners: Ed Burns, Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, Richard Price, David Simon—the writers of The Wire—for their essay in Time urging anyone sitting on a jury in a drug case to vote to acquit if no violence or threat of violence is alleged by the prosecution: "No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged, and most desperate citizens."

Sinner: Howie Kurtz, for (inevitably) adding Karl Rove to his endless list of right-wing love objects. (Previous chosen ones: Ari Fleischer, Rich Lowry, Bill Kristol, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and last, but never least, Andrew Sullivan.) Howie's verdict on Karl: "It's fair to say he's mellowed."

Winner: The New York Daily News, for reporting that the Duke of Westminister, the richest man in England, once haggled with one of his dates from Eliot Spitzer's favorite outfit, the Emperors Club.

Winners: Members of the Canadian opposition party, demanding the resignation of Canada's ambassador to the United States for meddling in the Democratic primary by disclosing contacts between an Obama aide and a Canadian diplomat.

Winner: Spitzer's favorite call girl, Ashley Dupré, aka "Kristen," who the New York Daily News reports has made up to $200,000 from the scandal, as downloads of her songs have skyrocketed. Curious scandal watchers can hear her sing for free on her MySpace page, which has already been viewed more than eight million times.

Winner: Derrick, the single best-informed voter of 2008.

Winner: Manuel Roig-Franzia, for a riveting account in the Washington Post of the burgeoning drug war south of the border.

	Meet the Press (NBC–Russert)	Face the Nation (CBS–Schieffer)	This Week (ABC–Stephanopoulos)
White Men	5	3	11
White Women	2	1	4
Black Men	2	3	2
Black Women	1	0	1
Gay People	0	0	1

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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. He has also written for Vanity Fair, The Los Angeles Times, New York, The Washington Post, The New York Observer, Rolling Stone, Details, Interview, The Advocate, Vogue, and Salon. He has taught journalism at Columbia and Princeton. To find out more, visit charleskaiser.com.

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