TV REVIEW : ‘Front Page’: From Feisty to Smart-Alecky : A solid investigative report kicks off Fox’s new newsmagazine tonight, but it’s all downhill from there.

The new Fox newsmagazine “Front Page” starts strong, then progressively weakens.

It opens at 9 tonight on KTTV-TV Channel 11 with a solid investigative effort allegedly linking Robert Evans and Bill MacDonald, the production team behind Paramount’s “Sliver,” to a duo of slick con men accused of bilking elderly investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Produced by veteran Los Angeles TV journalist Pete Noyes and reported by Vicki Liviakis (until recently a news anchor on KCOP-TV Channel 13), the story charges that the alleged scammers operated out of Evans’ offices on the Paramount lot during all of 1992 and part of this year. Consequently, authorities are also probing the financial dealings of Evans and MacDonald, “Front Page” reports.

Illuminating some of Hollywood’s possibly shady dealings, this is the kind of feisty, distinctive work that can give L.A.-produced “Front Page” a gleaming reputation as it competes for attention amid an increasingly crowded TV newsmagazine field whose other programs originate in New York. The two stories that follow in the episode--surrounded by glib, superficial, factoid-length commentaries whose words are secondary to flashy visuals--are the kind that can tarnish that reputation.

Produced by Shelley Lawrence and reported by Andria Hall, the second piece is a superficial look at teens who associate happiness with cosmetic surgery. “Front Page” follows one of them right into the operating room, and later she talks about her new and improved breasts. Although noting that some experts believe that teens are too young for such surgical procedures, the segment never examines the underlying societal or sociological causes of this obsession with physical appearance.

That task is left to “Front Page” correspondents who sit around a table afterward and fleetingly discuss what they’ve just seen. Flimsy and contrived, this little addendum is itself a sort of boob job, seemingly installed solely for cosmetics.

If the cosmetic surgery piece is merely thin, Ron Reagan’s adventure in Kanab, Utah, produces a smart-alecky story as offensive as it is misleading. The producer is Lee Schneider.

Reagan interviews Brent Childs, a man whose 500-acre spread is inhabited by a type of snail--known as the ambersnail--listed by the government as being an endangered species. Thus, Childs complains, he is unable to go forward with his plans to establish an RV park on his land.

All because of a little snail? Reagan is in shock. Let the snickers begin.

For “balance,” Reagan also briefly interviews Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, and a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service official. However, the piece is shaped in a way that irresponsibly ridicules by implication the entire philosophy behind the Endangered Species Act.

What “Front Page” doesn’t tell viewers is that, according to the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, only a small portion of the Childs property lies within the ambersnail habitat, so he reportedly can utilize most of his land as he sees fit. But noting that wouldn’t be as farcical as portraying so- called human progress being halted by tiny snails.

Nor does the segment address the snail’s place in a delicate ecological web where relationships among species can have lasting impact. “We are dealing with a complex ecosystem of which the snail is a part,” Pope said by phone from his San Francisco office. What would happen if Childs and his allies eliminated the snail from that ecosystem? “We haven’t a clue,” Pope said. “And neither do they.”

However, Reagan does have a clue about what makes people laugh, and he has a lot of fun repeatedly calling the ambersnail “bisexual.” Having fun, after all, and not truth, is what this story is all about.