“A Participant’s History?”: The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the Manipulation of Oral History

 
Abstract
“‘A Participant’s History?’: The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and the Manipulation of Oral History” is a critical examination of the CBC’s use of oral histories in its historical programming. ‘It examines two CBC productions on Canada’s military history: In Flanders’ Fields, a seventeen-part radio series on the First World War that aired from November 11, 1964 to March 7, 1965; and, The Valour and the Horror, a three-part television series on events of the Second World War that aired in 1992. This article shows how both projects manipulated oral history sources and engaged in “thesis-based” research in order to communicate or reinforce preconceived narratives of each war. A comparison of the unedited interview transcripts from the extensive interviews conducted with Canadian veterans for In Flanders’ Fields, and the subsequent edited material, reveals a pattern of a flawed research methodology that would be mirrored again during the making of The Valour and the Horror.

Teresa Iacobelli received her Ph.D. in History in 2009 from the University of Western Ontario in Canada. Iacobelli has extensive experience in the field of public history, including past positions with the Canadian War Museum and Library and Archives Canada. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is completing a postdoctoral fellowship on a major digital history project with the Rockefeller Archive Center in New York.

E-mail: tiacobelli@hotmail.com

For more go to:
http://ohr.oxfordjournals.org/content/38/2/331.full