Tuesday's Best Bets on TV

“The IFC Media project” (8 p.m., IFC): Considering how many shows tell you how to dress, lose weight, fix your house or find love, it’s unfortunate you don’t get more help in understanding the news media.

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

Don’t let the academic-sounding title put you off. This series of half-hour reports takes the subject seriously, but goes about it in a brisk, direct, sometimes wry-witted way. The series explores corporate and government influence, revenues and simple expediency, among other forces shaping the media’s news coverage.

All by itself, the first piece on the premiere 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.”

“The Mentalist” (9 p.m., CBS): Uh-oh, they’re trying to talk to the dead on “The Mentalist.” Our cocky hero is convinced a so-called psychic is a killer. So he sets up a seance in hopes of exposing him.

“Brothers to Brutha” (10:30 p.m., BET): “Brothers to Brutha” is a reality series that follows five brothers in an R&B group as they strive to make it big in the music biz without hitting too many sour notes. Can they live and work in harmony? If they did, there probably would be no show.