Frontline

"Girl, 14, and Her Lover in Vile Crime. " "Werewolf Seized in Southend. " "12 Sexy Days of Christmas. " "Mystery of Hideaway - Priest and a Nun. " "40,000 Bingo. " Those are some of the big news stories in the world of mogul Rupert Murdoch, who has circled the globe for more than 40 years, building an enormous media empire and leaving heaps of sleaze behind. He has also left a trail of lies, tricks and broken promises, according to tonight's expanded Frontline (Channel 12, 10 p.m.; Channel 39, 9 p.m.)

Ask Moorestown girls basketball coach Bill Kravitz to assess his team for the upcoming season, and he replies without hesitation: "We're a .500 team if we don't rebound. It's as simple as that. " For the Quakers, it just might be. All three of the Quakers' frontline players have graduated, leaving Kravitz with some very big problems up front. "There are so many big girls in this league," Kravitz said. "For us to be able to do as well as last season, we are going to have to be able to rebound.

Philadelphians may not learn anything new from "The Bombing of West Philly," tonight's Frontline presentation (Channel 12 at 10), but it's still the most important television show this city will see all year. "This is the story of how it happened and who is to blame," says narrator Lary Lewman as we see the burning homes of Osage Avenue on May 13, 1985, when an "entry device" was dropped on the headquarters of the radical MOVE organization. That's what this one-hour production does best: It marshals the facts in a clear, succinct way; conveys the full horror of what happened, and then lets you draw your own conclusions.

In the winter of 1692, a group of girls in Salem, Mass., found they could win the attention of their parents by making up stories about some of their neighbors. The subsequent brouhaha over witchcraft led to the imprisonment of about 150 people and the execution of 20. A disturbing, four-hour Frontline report airing tonight and tomorrow on Channel 12, Frontline's "Innocence Lost: The Verdict," implies that a similar, if smaller-scale, scenario has been unfolding in the North Carolina town of Edenton for more than four years.

The American dream drives our society resolutely. The faith that if you work hard, then you will get ahead is stronger for many Americans than any religious belief. Frontline visits a nightmare side of the dream tonight at 10 on Channel 12 (9 p.m. on Channel 39): two Milwaukee families struggling after layoffs. "Living on the Edge" is a purely anecdotal documentary - no overarching figures about the decline of America's middle class, just a close examination, over five years, of 12 people caught in a vise.

Who experienced the most change: the girls in Hillary Rodham's college class, during their four years at Wellesley - or the women who graduated, in the 25 years since? That's the starting question in tonight's Frontline, which profiles not Hillary Rodham Clinton, but some of her classmates, a group of women who, with notable exceptions, were launched loaded with expectations in 1969 into a world that slowly wore them down. These are privileged characters who aren't surprised at the high station achieved by their most famous classmate, who was also their president.

At midnight tonight, U.S. armed forces have the go-ahead to begin waging war in the Persian Gulf. How did this happen? Wasn't it just weeks ago that the nation's biggest military problem was how to split up the peace dividend? Suddenly, everyone's talking war. Watching "Frontline's" special report, "To the Brink of War" won't calm jittery nerves or give you a warm feeling about our foreign affairs. But for those who feel things have been happening too fast, this hour, which airs tonight at 9 on Channel 12, is a helpful guide to understanding the escalating crisis.

Ernest and Julio Gallo, the California winemakers, and their associates have given Sen. Bob Dole and his foundations $1.1 million over the years, making them the single largest contributors in Dole's lengthy political career. And according to "So You Want to Buy a President?," a 90-minute look at big-time money and big-time politics to be shown tonight at 10 on WHYY (Channel 12) as part of the PBS series Frontline, Dole has earned every penny. In fact, the price has been cheap when you consider that Dole, according to Frontline, pushed through an amendment to the tax code in 1986 that saved the Gallos something like $23 million in inheritance taxes.

In the aftermath of their second-half debacle in Game 1 of their Eastern Conference first-round series with Indiana, the 76ers spent a gorgeous Sunday morning watching film and praying to avoid a repeat performance. They had lost a 79-78 heartbreaker to the Pacers on Saturday, and the circumstances that led to that loss were enough to make them cringe. Pacers guard Travis Best, with an ailing back, recorded 16 points and 10 assists, and committed just one turnover in 44 minutes.

Two long-running PBS series, which are also two of public television's best weekly shows, begin their new seasons tonight with uncharacteristic episodes. Watching "Mind of a Serial Killer," Nova neophytes might think that they've stumbled on another installment, albeit a subdued one, of Cops. Not really. From microbiology to the ends of the universe, this series has consistently offered startling insights into science since it came on the air in 1974. And while tonight's Frontline may give some people a new perspective on the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill face-off, newcomers to the show would be hard pressed to divine from it that Frontline has presented significant investigative documentaries for 10 years.

THERE IS one thing 76ers coach Doug Collins has been searching for all season. It hasn't been the return of Andrew Bynum, nor any other form of help from an outside object. No, with the roster being littered with injuries throughout the season, Collins still sought just one thing from whoever was available from night to night: consistency. Saturday against the visiting Charlotte Bobcats and with former star Allen Iverson in the house (please no more emails about how they should try to get him to come back and play)

* KIND HEARTED WOMAN.9 p.m. Monday and Tuesday, WHYY 12.   "I DON'T remember the first time I got raped," says Robin Poor Bear, the subject of filmmaker David Sutherland's "Kind Hearted Woman," in Monday's PBS premiere. "But I remember the emergency room after the rape. " After she was put into foster care as a young child, her foster father and two of her foster brothers "raped and molested me throughout my childhood. " In almost any other TV setting, this would be the Big Moment, the catharsis that allows viewers to feel . . . what?

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. - Public television is putting its resources into a week-long examination of the Connecticut school shooting. PBS announced Monday it will air a series of programs under the umbrella title After Newtown . The February series will "continue the public conversation" on the topics of gun laws, mental illness, and school security, PBS said. Programs including PBS NewsHour , Frontline , and Washington Week With Gwen Ifill will be part of the initiative.

WHYY-FM has won a prestigious Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University Award for excellence in broadcast and digital journalism. WHYY shares the award with Harrisburg station WITF-FM and National Public Radio for a jointly produced series of radio and web reports on issues related to natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania. The awards were announced at the Columbia University School of Journalism in New York on Wednesday morning. The announcement praised the WITF/WHYY/NPR project, "StateImpact Pennsylvania," as "an important model for reporting on local issues.

I'M A SUCKER for a love story. I just never thought I'd see one on "Frontline. "   The weekly PBS documentary showcase rivals only "60 Minutes" in its Very Important Coverage of news and public affairs. The last thing you'd expect while watching "Frontline" is to reach for a Kleenex while pressing your hand to your heart and sniffling, "I LOVE these guys…" But if you watch Tuesday night's "Frontline" premiere of "Fast Times at West Philly High," I promise that you, too, will be tearful and smitten.

They say that if you lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas, but they're wrong. If you lie down with dogs, you wake up with ticks. The other day, I fell asleep with Little Tony and Peach, and I woke up with a tick on my chin, like a mole. It works for Cindy Crawford, but not for me. I'll never get a date if I wear bugs. I ran yelping to the bathroom, where I took off my nightgown and found another tick on my back. Don't ask me how it got under my nightgown. Obviously, ticks find me superhot.

Under cloudy skies and steady rain, Germantown Academy received an offensive explosion from its front three and completed the first half of its Inter-Ac League boys' lacrosse schedule with a 14-8 victory Tuesday at Episcopal Academy. The attack trio of senior captain Beau Jones and juniors Reid Weber and Billy Oppenhiemer combined for 10 goals. Coach David Martin said the three have learned to mesh their different styles to become a unit that isn't concerned with individual goals on a score sheet.

10 tonight CHANNEL 12 A sobering look at the effects of the war in Iraq on one group of men who served there - including more than 30 suicides at a single Army base and 14 soldiers from the same base charged or convicted in homicides.

Frontline's two-part documentary "Bush's War" is, essentially, a greatest-hits collection of a number of its previous reports on the war in Iraq. It includes many by its writer/director/producer, Michael Kirk: "Endgame," "Rumsfeld's War," "Cheney's Law," "The Lost Year in Iraq," "The Torture Question," and "The Dark Side. " "Bush's War" (shown tonight and tomorrow night at 9 on WHYY TV12) offers no new revelations in the 4 1/2 hours of the film; there were only two fairly minor anecdotes that I hadn't known previously (or had forgotten)

It'll be a long time before they ring down the final curtain on Curtains. The new Broadway murder-mystery musical, which opened Thursday night with a front-line cast, is 2 1/2-hours of old-fashioned escape. It boils over with polished songs by John Kander and the late Fred Ebb, the same team who wrote Chicago, and more than one is a showstopper. The gifted director, Scott Ellis, who could probably squeeze elegance from a Punch-and-Judy show, inspires Curtains with a big-time Broadway sensibility.