“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
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We asked several researchers and activists in the field of oral history to express their views on oral history questions. The names of each participant are listed at the beginning of their answers, and the text of all answers will be published on this portal by the end of the week. The goal of this project is to open new doors to an issue and promote scientific discussions in the field of oral history.Oral History of 40 Years
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After the completion of interview sessions, the original recordings are archived, the interviews are transcribed, proofread, and re-listened to. If the material possesses the qualities required for publication in the form of an article or a book, the editing process must begin. In general, understanding a verbatim transcription of an interview is often not straightforward and requires editing so that it may be transformed into a fluent, well-documented text that is easy to comprehend.100 Questions/8
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