Frontline Television Program

YOU get the overall impression of a lot of guys in ties -- some of them Bush administration officials, some of them journalists and some lawyers -- in the four-part "Frontline" series "News War: Secrets, Sources & Spin," beginning tonight on PBS. That everybody appears, in close-up, to belong to the same 9 o'clock dinner reservation is a controlling metaphor for what emerges, in the first hour, anyway, as a Washington potboiler among various corridors of power.

Elizabeth Edwards, facing invasive cancer, has said that she doesn't intend to let the disease "be the boss of me." That brand of courage is on display in "So Much So Fast," a documentary about a remarkable young man who's diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) but who won't be deterred from living a full life. The film, from Academy Award-nominated directors Steven Ascher and Jeanne Jordan, airs as part of PBS' "Frontline" series at 9 tonight on KCET.

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, pushing his memoir, "In the Line of Fire," was a guest last week on "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" -- a surreal warmup to the harder-hitting "Return of the Taliban," on PBS at 9 tonight. The "Frontline" documentary explores how the Taliban, having been routed from Afghanistan five years ago, have retrenched in Pakistan, the putative U.S. ally.

With his wide-eyed scholarly enthusiasm, youthful good looks and penchant for world travel, is doing his best to become the Indiana Jones of economics. Certainly the Harvard professor, economist, historian and bestselling author has become something of a poster pundit for the continuing global economic crisis. The publication of "The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World" seems a miracle of perfect timing and comes complete with a four-hour documentary that will air on PBS this year.

Once the February sweeps battle ends, ABC is going to war. "Profiles From the Front Line," an unscripted program that has languished for months on the network's shelf, will join ABC's Thursday lineup for a limited six-week run starting Feb. 27, a day after the current rating sweeps end. More significantly, that debut coincides with a window when U.S.

As the U.S. Senate debates Medicare reform this week, you might be forgiven for stifling a yawn and wondering, "Haven't we heard this before?" And if you aren't yet of a certain age, you might also question how the topic of prescription drug benefits for senior citizens affects your life now. But as tonight's "Frontline" shows, the battle over the cost of pharmaceuticals knows no age limits.

Title it McMartin II. Or Salem witch hunts anew. Ofra Bikel's three "Innocence Lost" documentaries about the deeply troubling Little Rascals Day Care case--the last of which airs Tuesday night on the PBS series "Frontline"--are one long, throbbing, agonizing ache, a remarkable body of work that records an odyssey of anguish straddling a hellish eight years. And does nothing to inspire confidence in the legal system.

The Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington is the virtual reality of memorials, a huge cocoon of unthinkable, unfathomable, nightmarish history where you can browse for hours and lose yourself in an environment of doom and genocide, feeling almost as if you're the one wearing an Auschwitz number. Evil can't be isolated like a virus and sealed in by bricks and mortar, however.

He was . . . somebody, still is . . . somebody. But how much less of a somebody is the theme of a "Frontline" documentary that notes the Rev. Jesse Jackson's epic achievements through the late 1980s while ultimately depicting him as an almost tragic figure who kicked down racial and political doors he may never pass through. Someone who seems unaware today that his moment in history may have passed.

Tuesday's "Frontline" documentary, "Smoke in the Eye," delivers no banner headlines concerning last year's wheezing, coughing, tobacco-reporting calamities at ABC and CBS. After all, these titanic clashes of network news divisions and corporate interests already have been widely covered, dissected and debated. Yet the clarity of what's at stake is much more acute when they converge in a single, incisive PBS hour, one co-produced with a respected Canadian series, "The 5th Estate."