Now, THAT was informative. Kill it. NOW. All of it.

God help us, SC ETV Radio and TV is the most hopeless media assemblage ever assembled. This evening they were peddling 30 year old Naturescenes documentaries like they were made yesterday (you can buy them for $19.99: just pretend Rudy Mancke is still a boy who handles snakes) and putting up staff personalities telling us about how fabulous SCETV was.

The problem is, everything they brag about was broadcast thirty, forty, or fifty years ago, and comes with its own cringeworthy reminiscence by some elderly SCETV employee or board member. Like how they used to teach Chinese over the air. A black kid learned Chinese that way.

He won't any more. He can just watch endless episodes of "Arthur" on SCETV's varied channels all showing the same thing.

Anyway, the reminiscer had to go to DC to  speak to Congress, and he took the black kid along. Asked about the value of SCETV's educational programs, the man- white- told the members of the Congressional committee, he thought "this boy" he'd brought along could tell them better. And the black kid dutifully addressed the committee in Chinese. "Look! A nigra who can learn! Please, Senator Thurmond, another earmark?"

The people who run SCETV are so out of touch it's scary, especially when you look up their email addresses, email them, and get no response. Ever. What's the point?

How long can you run thirty year old BBC comedies on weekends? Judi Dench and Geoffrey Palmer will die, eventually. How can you run a New York Times article that talks about how well-funded SCETV "is" without showing the obviously ancient date when it was published? Anybody who can read knows its funding has been cut, and cut and cut.

It's becoming a big shell game. When's the last time a movie company hired the studios, as they advertise happens? When they run the ad talking about all the famous stars who's "appeared before SCETV cameras" has anyone noticed Bob Hope's and Peter Falk's heydays were a really long time ago?

Bob Hope died in 2003. He was a hundred years old. Pater Falk is 83. Either the clips they show is really old or he has held up better than he seems to have done on his few recent media appearances.

This morning on South Carolina Business Review, radio host Mike Switzer did his usual Monday morning interview with John Warner, who follows Upstate SC economic development via his Swampfox website.

Warner told an interesting tale about how Greenville hosted an econ dev team from Knoxville, TN. He argued that for every big redevelopment project in the Upstate, it needed a champion: someone with the heft to get things like the Hyatt downtown or Falls Park off the dime.

It made sense. It made me wonder, who is the champion for attracting the volume of knowledge workers- and changing the anti-knowledge worker culture of the state? And if there is no one, how do we find someone to pick up the fallen standard?

Switzer finished his interview with the advice that if one wanted to know more, just look up SC Business Review on the ETV Radio website.

So I did.

Here's what I found:

SC Business Review

South Carolina Business Review, with host Mike Switzer, features news and interviews from South Carolina's public companies and business leaders.

For questions, comments, or information about underwriting E-mail Mike Switzer.

What's On

(Browse our archive)

The week of 08/23/2010

Monday, Aug 23, 2010

Narrative:  The pulse of the SC business community is being monitored through news, blog comments, and events at www.swampfox.ws, a weekly feature on the SC Business Review. 

Description: Mike Switzer interviews John Warner, founder and publisher of www.swampfox.ws based in Greenville, SC.

Damn. I sure learned a lot from that.