From Chuck Klosterman to the New Yorker's Rick Hertzberg, Charles Kaiser rounds up this week's media winners and sinners

Winner: Rick Hertzberg in the New Yorker for his comment on how Bill and Hillary went negative on Barack Obama. Hertzberg's bottom line: "Hillary Clinton would make a competent, knowledgeable, and responsible president. Barack Obama just might make a transformative one." As the lead piece in the magazine, this looked suspiciously like the New Yorker endorsing Obama. But editor David Remnick reminded me, "When we endorsed John Kerry in 2004, the piece ran over the byline 'the Editors.' This piece, an excellent piece, ran with Rick's name." Look for a formal endorsement of whomever the Democratic nominee is closer to the general election.

Winner: Susan Lenfestey for asking "what would Molly do?" on the anniversary of Molly Ivins' death. Well, we know who the columnist (who was also my hero) would not have voted for, because she made that clear two years ago: "I'd like to make it clear to the people who run the Democratic Party that I will not support Hillary Clinton for president. Enough. Enough triangulation, calculation and equivocation." Go Barack!

Winners: Jo Becker and Don Van Natta for an extraordinary inside look at how Bill Clinton introduced Canadian businessman Frank Giustra to Kazakhstan president Nursultan A. Nazarbayev, whose human rights record has been excoriated by a number of United States senators, including Hillary Clinton. Giustra had no prior connection to the uranium business in Kazakhstan, but two days after he and Clinton met with the Kazakhstan president, Giustra got the right to buy into three uranium projects there. Then Giustra gave Clinton's foundation $131 million. All just a happy coincidence, according to a Clinton spokesman.

Sinner: Anne Applebaum for an odd celebration of the sudden appearance of "extraordinarily, unbelievably, stunningly gorgeous" Russian women, sometime around 1995. Applebaum speculates that in the bad old days, attractive Russian women were held back by their lack of makeup and the dearth of "rich men" in Russia (because pretty women always marry rich men). "To put it bluntly, in the Soviet Union there was no market for female beauty."

So is this why they lost?

Winner: Chuck Klosterman for a compelling piece about New England Patriot quarterback Tom Brady and the pursuit of perfection. Before the Super Bowl, Klosterman wrote that the Patriots had to lose if they want to immortalize themselves. Fans, he argued, prefer their heroes to be fallible, instead of perfect machines.

Sinners: Former Air Force chief of staff and Obama military adviser Gen. Merrill McPeak for ridiculing Hillary Clinton. The general said Obama has "real gravitas, not artificially created, focus-grouped, poll-directed, rehearsed gravitas," adding that the Illinois senator "doesn't go on television and have crying fits; he isn't discovering his voice at the age of 60." McPeak later retracted his remarks, and the Obama camp disassociated itself from them.

Winner: Bill Clinton, who the New York Post reported got more mentions in presidential campaign coverage last week than the whole GOP field. The analysis, conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, found that at least one Clinton was mentioned in 35 percent of the coverage. GOP front-runner John McCain got a paltry 7.1 percent of coverage. But did it help his wife?

Winner: The Los Angeles Times for another horrifying story, reporting an alleged U.S. war crime where detainees were executed after being captured by American troops. The Army's Criminal Investigation Command is pursuing an investigation, according to the Times.

Winner: Adam Nossiter for a reality check from Tennessee on the unpopularity of Hillary and "Anyone but Obama-Osama" in border states like Tennessee and Arkansas. But Nossiter didn't mention that the Democrats failed to carry either state in 2000 or 2004; Virginia and possibly Georgia are better bets for the Democrats in 2008.

Sinners: New York Times news editors for consistently overplaying anti-Obama stories, most recently a Mike McIntire piece about Obama's failure to get a bill passed that would require nuclear companies to immediately notify surrounding committees of any dangerous leaks from their plants. The story would have been perfectly appropriate at 700 words inside; instead it was 1,735 words on the front page, above the fold. This comes from a corporate culture where editors enjoy proving that they don't publish a predictably liberal paper. Two years ago, this led to a whole series of ridiculous pieces (for an example, see here) by Stephanie Strom attacking the ACLU, mostly for specious reasons.

Winner: Nathaniel Rich, for a lovely meditation on changes in Manhattan since he was born here in 1980.

Sinner: Rupert Murdoch, for adding tits and ass (already!) to the Wall Street Journal. Paul Karl Lukacs counted a dozen models in a single issue—plus "photos of actress Kyra Sedgwick, actress Eva Longoria Parker, actress Brooke Shields (in a review headlined "Sex and the Office"), Cleavage Singer Woman from Page A1, singer Ashlee Simpson, and a photo of random party girls at a Las Vegas nightclub." I guess Michael Wolff was right about the Journal's future under Murdoch after all: "a certain leveling, the loss of a few points of I.Q., a quickened pace, a higher sense of drama, less accurate, perhaps, but less tedious too, and, likely, a keener instinct for following the money."

	Meet the Press (NBC–Russert)	Face the Nation (CBS–Schieffer)	This Week (ABC–Stephanopoulos)
White Men	9	2	11
White Women	2	1	3
Black Men	1	1	3
Black Women	0	0	0
Gay People	0	0	0

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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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