WWW= Taking a microphone and camera crew to the gates of an Aruba landfill this past week, Greta Van Susteren returned to the island that her nightly Fox News Channel program has figuratively called home recently.

Van Susteren’s “On the Record” has relentlessly followed the mysterious disappearance of 18-year-old Natalee Holloway of Alabama while the teen was on a graduation trip to Aruba in May.

Critics find it an obsession bordering on the bizarre, twisting traditional notions of news judgment and becoming Exhibit A in the media’s fascination with missing people – as long as they happen to be young, white, female and pretty.

But while doing this, Van Susteren has been rewarded with her biggest audiences since she switched from CNN three years ago.

She averaged nearly 2.2 million viewers a night in July, up 58 percent from the same period a year ago, according to Nielsen Media Research. CNN’s Aaron Brown used to put up a tough fight in the time slot; now Van Susteren routinely triples his audience. She narrowly missed 3 million on July 26, her biggest audience ever.

“On the Record” even topped Fox’s prime-time king, “The O’Reilly Factor,” seven times, although Bill O’Reilly was off three of those nights.

“I’m always happy when the viewers are happy,” Van Susteren said. “I obviously don’t program for the people in the newsroom or my friends or the people I went to law school with. I program for the viewers.”

It’s not just Nielsen that confirms interest in the Holloway story. Van Susteren said she spends an hour or two a day reading e-mails about the case from viewers; often, they supply her with good questions.

The mystery plays to her strengths as a lawyer.

“For me, it’s sort of an intellectual challenge,” she said.

“Where is she? How did she disappear? Did somebody drop a date rape drug in her drink? Did she walk off? Is this not really a homicide but a missing person? … These are fascinating to me and they’re obviously fascinating to the viewers.”

Desperate to learn what happened to Natalee, the Holloway family has been grateful for the interest and available to help fill hours of airtime.

“Greta has gone above and beyond to publicize this case and keep people interested,” said Paul Reynolds, Natalee’s uncle. “Getting involved the way she has been is an incredible effort. She’s keeping people interested and keeping people looking.”

The Aruban government hasn’t been happy with all the coverage, believing much of it makes the authorities look amateurish and unprofessional, but Van Susteren has government spokesman Ruben Trapenberg’s respect. “Even though she is aggressive, she will try to get both sides of a story,” he said.

The case has all the elements of a classic summer page-turner: the bright-eyed girl whose search for fun may have gone horribly wrong, a privileged Dutch boy who saw her before she disappeared but claims innocence, authorities following several hot and cold leads.

Without being a regular, tuning into Van Susteren’s show many nights is like opening up a mystery novel in the middle.

It’s all a little baffling to those who didn’t buy the book.

“I think she’s registered to vote in Aruba now,” joked NBC News reporter Josh Mankiewicz, who narrated a “Dateline NBC” report last week examining why networks pay inordinate attention to missing white women.

With war and terrorism ongoing, critics wonder how one missing person case can so dominate a news program. Even on the night President George W. Bush nominated John G. Roberts to the U.S. Supreme Court, “On the Record” spent far more time on Holloway.

“Emotional pornography like the Natalee Holloway story is more alluring, just as a car crash is better TV than a news conference,” said Matthew Felling of the Washington-based Center for Media and Public Affairs. “But this media rubbernecking is partly to blame for the public’s dissatisfaction in the media as a news-gathering enterprise.”

Two views on how to program a cable news network couldn’t be displayed more starkly: Either use news judgment to put events into perspective, or give the people what they want, said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

It’s hard to say whether Van Susteren’s ratings grew because she spent more time on the case or whether she spent more time on the case because the ratings grew, said Bill Shine, Fox News Channel’s vice president of production.

Probably a bit of both, he said.

” … Say you’re at a beach or in the deli…. What do you think people are going to ask you? What do you think is going to happen with the Roberts nomination next month? Or what’s going on with that story in Aruba?” Shine said. “I think my money would be on Aruba.”

Rosenstiel can’t understand the intense interest in the Holloway story. “It’s just a classic tabloid story that they’re milking, and if that’s the way you want to make your living, fine,” he said.

Criticism of cable networks for slavish devotion to a story, whether it merits the attention or not, is nothing new; the disappearances of murder victims Chandra Levy and Laci Peterson drew the same intense coverage that the Holloway case has. One of many reasons Fox has been able to trounce CNN in the ratings with a considerably smaller news staff is that viewers respond to this approach. `”Maybe part of their brilliance,” Rosenstiel said, “is they’re not as guilt-ridden about it.”