There’s an interesting and extremely odd piece in today’s Globe & Mail about my day job, the CBC Digital Archives site.

In A grab bag of CBC history, Ivor Tossell is mostly positive about the site:

While the CBC Archives website isn’t mind-blowing just yet, it’s growing into a fantastic grab bag of Canadian history — or something like it. The site features carefully chosen archival TV and radio clips by the hundreds, grouping them around topics that range from the Rolling Stones’ visits to Canada to the Halifax explosion of 1917. For each topic, there are a handful of broadcast clips spanning the years — for the Halifax explosion, say, eight television clips and four radio clips. And for each individual clip, a little box off to the side displays contextual information, which is usually thorough and interesting. It all piles up: There’s enough material to lose a history fetishist in there for days. (And the collection of clips on the evolution of computers and the Internet is just terrific.)

But Tossell also injects a thesis: that the CBC Archives site is about CBC, not history.

In fact, the more you watch, the more you realize that for all the Cancon, the CBC Archives site isn’t about Canada; it’s about the CBC itself. It might be a distinction that the Corporation encourages people to blur, but it does exist. This isn’t a definitive historical collection, but an intriguing documentary of a broadcaster’s evolution.

That’s certainly one thing that is documented in the archives – along with just about everything else that has shaped Canada in the past 70 years. And it’s a valid point in the context of the bigger argument that no media outlet is the entirely neutral observer that most pretend to be. Nor is any historian, for that matter – there’s always a point of view.

That viewpoint, logically, extends back into the archives. A document isn’t neutral just because it’s old (quite the opposite, in my experience – the air of detached neutrality is a reasonably recent invention.)

But that’s not what Tossell is getting at. He compares the CBC site to the BBC’s (a parallel he admits is “odious”) and argues that the BBC site is more about history than about the broadcaster itself. He demonstrates CBC’s self-reference by pointing to the single clip on the site that’s about the site – a presentation to the Queen (Self reference: that’s me with Her Majesty in the photo!)

OK, fair enough, we’re blowing our horn here. But it’s the only one of more than 10,000 clips that talks about our own site. The vaunted BBC doesn’t ignore itself either – check out its Themes/Radio & Television section, where half of the 23 clips are about the BBC.

I imagine if I combed through the Globe’s archives, I’d find a few stories about the newspaper too. (For the record, the CBC Archives site has clips about the BBC and the Globe too.)

A couple of reactions from CBC Digital Archives staffers:

Whose coverage were we supposed to use (besides our own)? Does any one else have more live coverage of the history of Canada? Even if someone did, would we then use their footage?

and

Broadcasting, like history, evolves. Our understanding of history is equally affected by the means we got the story in the first place. To suggest that the BBC “pushes history into the foreground” by re-purposing copy from the date in question is incorrect. The Beeb has evolved technically as well as editorially and like the CBC, it has a point of view, just like the Globe & Mail.

For me, that’s always been the most captivating part of the Archives – watching broadcasting evolve alongside technology and societal values.

Some of my favourite examples:

• - This clip about Africville, where the reporter actually uses the N-word when interviewing a black man (and gets called on it)
• - The clip where a child reacts to the moon landing by saying she’ll never get to go to space – because she’s a girl
• - The air quotes in Peter Mansbridge’s first mention of something called “internet”
• - The play-by-play coverage of the 1939 royal visit, where the reporters eschew actuality in favour of droning on and on
• - The horribly stilted, scripted “conversation” about what women should do after the war

It’s all there, warts and all. And it’s fascinating. Why wouldn’t we cover the evolution of broadcasting, or ourselves?

Lord knows everybody else does.

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