Damning with faint praise

Howard Kurtz wraps up the Aughts: 

[L]et's examine what Time, in one of a spate of similar pieces, calls the "Decade from Hell." The media scorecard wasn't all bad. ... Newspapers exposed George W. Bush's domestic surveillance program ...

Kurtz's inclusion of coverage of the domestic spying program among the highlights of the media's performance over the past decade is a pretty good sign of just how awful coverage of the Bush administration was.

Remember: The New York Times knew about the spying prior to the 2004 presidential election, but held the story for more than a year at the Bush administration's request.  

And when the Times finally did run the story, newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post didn't exactly go all-out to follow up on the scandal, giving it far less attention than they had given comparatively unimportant things like Whitewater and President Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

And that's one of Kurtz's examples of the media doing a good job.