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NEW YORK - Just before 7 p.m., Peter Jennings stands on the floor of Madison Square Garden and begins to speak into a hand-held microphone. As delegates to the Republican National Convention mill around him, a few snapping pictures, he offers a brief description of the day's news and foreshadows the speeches by backers of President Bush to come. As ABC's half-hour-long World News Tonight draws to an end, Jennings is appearing live before millions of television viewers. A few seconds later, the dapper anchor, after smoothing invisible creases in his blazer and adjusting his trademark pocket square, faces the camera and starts to speak again.

To build on its Desperate Housewives momentum, ABC announced yesterday that it will shift Lost to a later hour and add 12 new series next season. ABC is banking on Freddie Prinze Jr., Fred Savage and the Night Stalker. WB announced it will add three dramas and a comedy in the fall and heavily rework its lineup. Everwood, One Tree Hill and Smallville will move to new nights. Jack & Bobby and Steve Harvey's Big Time are canceled. At ABC, five new series - three dramas and two comedies - will reach the air in the fall.

Does ABC deserve a "D" for desperation or an "E" for effort? Faced with the frustrating reality that Fox got its show Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy on the air a month ago, ABC is valiantly (or vainly) promoting its show Wife Swap as "the original." Which it was. A year ago. In England. If there were any likelihood that Wife Swap would be the "water-cooler show" that ABC hoped for, surely it has been reduced sharply by the pre-emptive debut of Fox's knock-off, which last week attracted 7.4 million viewers, good for a decent but unceremonious 43rd place in the Nielsen prime-time rankings.

Once a consumer crusader as a local television reporter, John Stossel has made a name for himself in recent years at ABC News as a contrarian challenging conventional wisdom. He finds society to be populated by nettlesome critics of corporate America, especially those ideologues he says are masquerading as environmental or health advocates. In ABC's "Tampering With Nature," a one-hour special to be aired Friday, Stossel says some of those ideologues are busy brainwashing schoolchildren to believe that the world is a very scary place.

ABC will enter the cable-dominated TV terrain of such shows as "Pawn Stars" starting March 24 with the debut of "Ball Boys," a 12-episode, Saturday-afternoon, reality TV series set in Baltimore County at Robbie's 1st Base. ABC announced the show on its portion of the TCA press tour in Los Angeles. Here's an account from "Channel Guide" magazine: Ball Boys comes from the producers of Pawn Stars and will follow the action at Robbie's 1st Base in Baltimore, and the family-like relationships of the sports fanatics who work there, Robbie Sr. and Junior, Sweet Lou and Shaggy.

For good or ill, Baltimore's Johns Hopkins Hospital becomes a network TV star tonight, thanks to ABC executive Phyllis McGrady. "Hopkins 24/7," a six-hour cinema verite look at the staff and patients whose lives the medical center often defines, debuts at 10 p.m. on ABC (WMAR, Channel 2). Over the next four weeks, viewers will meet doctors at the top of their games, teen-agers with life-threatening diseases, exhausted medical students questioning whether medicine is really their future, even a giant sea turtle that just isn't feeling well.

LOS ANGELES -- In one of its largest prime-time commitments to documentary programming ever, ABC will air a six-hour film on Baltimore's Johns Hopkins medical center for six weeks starting next month. "Hopkins 24/7," a cinema-verite-style journey through the institution, will debut Aug. 30, with a second hour airing Aug. 31 in a showcase time period right after "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire." The other four hours will air Sept. 6, 13, 20 and 27. Each night's episode runs from 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. "It's a very important project for us," Phyllis McGrady, ABC News vice president in charge of special programming, said yesterday in a telephone interview.

NEW YORK -- The world will soon get to evaluate actor Leonardo DiCaprio's journalistic skills: ABC News said it will air its Earth Day special -- complete with excerpts of DiCaprio's controversial interview with President Clinton -- at 8 p.m. on April 22. After screening a raw version of the program, the network decided Tuesday to include portions of the March 31 interview, which had sparked internal dissent among ABC News journalists who said the plum...

As Dr. Christina Catlett leaves the Johns Hopkins Hospital trauma center each evening, she tries to shake the day's searing images - the drug overdoses, gunshot wounds, heart attacks and other heartbreaks. She wants to be able to sleep. "As I drive out of Baltimore City to the county, I almost literally let all that emotion drain out of my body, and let my mind go blank," Catlett said recently. As a result, she commonly remembers little about the scenes that stirred her to tears or anger.

Jason Winer was directing Julie Bowen on first episode of "Modern Family" when inspiration struck. "In the initial draft, Julie's character was described as mildly controlling and neurotic," Winer says of the suburban sitcom mom. "But what she didn't have in that draft was this idea that she was formerly a bad girl who had kind of reformed herself. " Winer thought the extra history could add an important dimension to Bowen's Claire Dunphy — and make a difference to the story featuring her teenage daughter, Haley, who just starting dating.