Just kill it off and be done with it.

Cotton Boll Conspiracy has a telling comment about the utter lameness that is public broadcasting in South Carolina, linking to a newspaper article that is little more than a reprinted press release.

When you compare SC ETV to the WUNC network to the north, it's enough to make you cry. WUNC's no great shakes, but next to SC ETV it's Mount Rushmore next to a dung beetle heap.

SC ETV's been getting orgasmic about its fifty year run of crap programming, mostly celebrating things that don't exist any more- like William F Buckley Jr's Firing Line- or that are on life support, like Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz. All kinds of children's shows they've canceled. The endless radio ads begging for used cars and donations when you die.


Former PBS president Van Gordon Sauter once compared the typical PBS station to a telephone boiler room with an antenna on the roof, and it sure fits SC ETV.

ETV does so little local programming you have to wonder why they get up in the morning. Rowland Alston's Making It Grow is nothing more than a commercial for nursery owners crossed with a minstrel show. Rudy Mancke's snake-handling is thirty years old- at least- and his radio blurbs are so mumbled it took me a year to figure out what his name was. Walter Edgar's TV shows are always excellent but so infrequent as to be virtually nonexistent.

The network-radio and TV- has no news department. They read the first paragraph of stories from The Post & Courier when they cut in on NPR's news reports. Their broadcasts of regional classical music programs are produced by North Carolina public radio outlets and the rest come from PRI. Their noon show is an hour-long ad for Clemson, and they drop The Radio Reader into the middle of Morning Edition. Brief as it is, Speaking of Schools is just embarrassing. The Upstate in SC doesn't really exist for SC ETV. It's all Columbia and Charleston.

Want to know about jobs with ETV? You have to write them a letter to ask for a list. On their deplorably poor website ETV leadership have email addresses, but if you write to complain about things they won't answer.