NEWS & NOTES : VETERAN DOCUMENTARY SHOWS AWARDED TOP NEWS EMMYS.

Byline: Daily News Wire Services

With four trophies apiece, ``Nightline,'' ``Frontline'' and ``60 Minutes'' were the big winners of the 18th annual News and Documentary Emmy Awards, presented Wednesday night in Manhattan. Their respective networks - ABC, PBS and CBS - also led the pack.

ABC News and the Public Broadcasting Service each came away from the awards dinner with 10 Emmys, while CBS News won 9.

NBC News won six, but three were for technical categories like art direction, audio and camerawork; the other three went to the newsmagazine program ``Dateline.'' Four of ABC's awards and three of PBS' also were for technical achievements. All of CBS' were for news coverage or documentaries.

The 48 Emmy Awards, presented by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in New York City after a selection process known for its arcane voting process and criteria, were chosen from more than 1,300 entries in 32 sometimes overlapping categories.

CNN won an Emmy for outstanding instant coverage of a single breaking news story for its coverage of the Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta in July 1996.

The documentary series ``Frontline,'' produced by WGBH in Boston, won content-based Emmys for ``The Choice '96,'' ``The Navy Blues'' and ``Secret Daughter.'' It won an outstanding director award for ``Angel on Death Row.''

Other PBS programs that won for their content rather than for technical achievements were ``The News Hour With Jim Lehrer,'' for ``Hebron: The First Test''; the documentary ``TR: The Story of Theodore Roosevelt,'' for writing by David Grubin and Geoffrey Ward, and the documentary series ``POV,'' for ``AKA Don Bonus'' and ``The Transformation.''

``Nightline'' won for its continuing series on race, ``America in Black and White''; ``Dole: The Home Stretch,'' for segments on Bob Dole's presidential campaign; ``Anatomy of the Unabomber Suspect's Arrest,'' and, in the category of outstanding historical programming, for ``The Avengers,'' about Holocaust survivors who sought revenge.

Two awards were given for outstanding investigative journalism segments: to NBC's newsmagazine ``Dateline'' for ``Caught in the Net,'' a three-part series on a New Age businessman; and to ABC's ``World News Tonight,'' anchored by Peter Jennings, for a segment called ``Moneywatch.'' Another, for investigative journalism in a single program, went to Cinemax for ``The Selling of Innocents,'' about child prostitution in Bombay.

``60 Minutes'' won for these segments: ``Punishing Saddam''; ``How He Won the War,'' about David Koestler's crusade against tobacco; ``Dusko Tadic,'' about the pursuit of a Bosnian Serb charged with war crimes; and ``A Woman of Substance,'' about the opera singer Denyce Graves. Its sister CBS newsmagazine program, ``48 Hours,'' won for outstanding general coverage of a breaking news story for a program on co-education at the Citadel military academy.

``It's nice to win awards, but I happen to think the idea of journalists vying for recognition is unseemly,'' Don Hewitt, the longtime executive producer of ``60 Minutes,'' said Thursday. ``I feel the same way about Pulitzers for print journalists. Great journalism should be its own reward.''

Canada doesn't love Howard: Howard Stern doesn't seem to be making friends in Canada. Advertisers are pulling out after the shock jock's debut Sept. 2 on radio caused a public furor, marked by a flood of complaints to Canada's broadcast regulator. The ads were pulled from Toronto station Q-107 and Montreal station CHOM-FM, where Stern's morning four-hour show airs daily.