Av Westin

There was a time when true believers had to rifle through supermarket tabloids to find out the latest on whether Elvis Presley really died the day a bloated, overdosed body, now buried in the King's grave, was found in a bathroom in Graceland. Such inconveniences are now long past. Flip on the tube Wednesday night, and, in the privacy of your own home, you can glory in two hours of "live" television dedicated to proving that Elvis not only did not die on Aug.

Imagine one of the three broadcast-TV networks deciding to get out of the evening news business. Citing losses on many fronts, from shrinking ad dollars to the huge expenditures required to cover global crises live in an unsettled world, the network announces that it will no longer produce a nightly newscast. The familiar anchor goes off to front a profitable news magazine show.

A veteran producer this week alleged that Fox News executives issue a daily memorandum to staff on news coverage to bend the network's reporting into conformity with management's political views, refocusing attention on the partisan bias of America's most watched cable news operation. The charges by Charlie Reina, 55, whose six-year tenure at Fox ended April 9, first surfaced Wednesday in a letter he posted on an influential Web site (www.poynter.

Don Hewitt, the innovative television news pioneer who changed the face of broadcast journalism in 1968 as the creator and executive producer of "60 Minutes," the long-running CBS News powerhouse that launched the TV newsmagazine genre and turned a ticking stopwatch into a journalistic icon, died today. He was 86. Hewitt, who spent more than 60 years at CBS and shared or individually won an array of honors, including Emmy and Peabody awards, died of pancreatic cancer at his home in Bridgehampton, N.Y., the network announced.

Fred Friendly, former president of CBS News, caused quite a stir last August when he told the Radio and Television News Directors Assn. in Salt Lake City that after years of being an outspoken critic of local TV news, he now thinks that if he were starting his career over again, he'd do it in local news. "That's where the news audience, the technology and certainly the air time are," he said.

He looks more invented than real, like a character in an Arnaud de Borchgrave novel filled with international intrigue and right-wing derring-do. A fringe of blond hair cloaks a shiny head. The shirt is white on white, the suit dark and expensive. The watch is gold and so is the heavy linked bracelet. There are three rings and they flash as his hands work over some Turkish worry beads. The beads, too, are pure gold.

Four months ago, Andy Rooney suddenly stepped out of his best-known role as the avuncular (if crotchety) antidote to Mike Wallace on "60 Minutes" and wrote a nationally syndicated newspaper column in which he blistered his employer, CBS, for turning its news division into "a business enterprise first, a moral enterprise second. . . . " "CBS News will never again be as good as it once was," Rooney warned.