For the next six weeks, the meager list of TV resources has been boosted by one remarkably informative entry: The IFC Media Project.

The series explores corporate and government influence, revenues and simple expediency, among other forces shaping news coverage.

The first piece (Tuesday at 7 p.m.) reveals a lot -- pack-journalism mentality, an obsession with ratings and the need to fill hours of airtime inexpensively -- by asking: Why are the media obsessed with missing white girls?

A major part of the answer: A publicity agent who makes big bucks as a ghoulish "talent scout," identifying cases with the potentially broadest audience appeal and, with the complicity of media outlets, making absentee "stars" of the victims he helps "launch."

Coming: A primer on how the Bush administration sold the Iraq war to the American people with strategies such as the imbed program.

The series' host is Peabody- and Emmy-winning journalist Gideon Yago. And its creator is Meghan O'Hara, whose film credits include a longtime collaboration with Michael Moore on his features Sicko, Fahrenheit 9/11 and Bowling for Columbine -- an association that may cause some to skip The IFC Media Project without a glance.

But that would be a shame. Members of the public who most doubt (or even hate) the media may find useful arguments in this series.

Other shows to look out for:

* In that way she has of getting inside children's heads, Linda Ellerbee is exploring a question lots of kids have surely contemplated: What's it like for their peers who are wheelchair-bound?

Four kids -- afflicted with muscular dystrophy, a spinal cord injury, cerebral palsy and spina bifida -- invite the audience to share "the view from my chair" on Nick News with Linda Ellerbee. Then those children briefly defy their chief nemesis as they and Ellerbee go on a zero-gravity flight, achieving temporary weightlessness. But even life on planet Earth doesn't get the kids down.

The program premieres Sunday at 8 p.m. on Nickelodeon.

* For decades, to be called an "Einstein" is to be hailed as the brainiest person around. But there was a time when even the original Albert Einstein was dismissed as less than a genius.

Cable's History channel presents Einstein, a two-hour look at his 15-year struggle to prove the Theory of Relativity. It would upend three centuries of scientific thought and lay the groundwork for modern physics.

But its emergence is set against the backdrop of ostracism by Einstein's fellow scientists and the travails of a failed marriage, as well as the upheaval of World War I. Woven through the film are interviews with leading physicists, astronomers, historians and Einstein scholars. Einstein airs at 8 p.m. Monday.

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