CBC is Destroying its Archives in the Name of Preservation - Better Governance Needed

This press release below raises very serious issues about the governance of the CBC - not unlike recent issues involving the National Gallery and the inexplicably bad decision to "deaccession" Chagall's masterpiece Tour Eiffel painting. How can lame duck outgoing presidents - Hubert Lacroix of the CBC  and Marc Mayer of the National Gallery - be allowed to do so much damage? Where is the good governance? Independence is important - but so is the national heritage. We need to do better. The National Gallery train wreck was somehow averted.This one must be too.Tell @JustinTrudeau @MelanieJoly 

HPK

FRIENDLY GIANT FACES FIRING SQUAD!

TORONTO, ON.  April 30, 2018.   Thousands of episodes of home-grown CBC television shows that captured life in Canada are about to be systematically destroyed.

Gone in a flash will be childhood icons like The Friendly Giant and Mr. Dress-up, as well as episodes of Canadian television classic such as Wayne & Shuster, King of Kensington, Tommy Hunter and The Beachcombers. 

CBC has decided betacam versions of these and hundreds of other iconic Canadian TV shows are no longer relevant so a destruction order for 26,163 recordings will be carried out this week. These vintage recordings will be ground up into small pieces, then shipped for incineration to New York where the steam generated will feed energy into the state’s power grid.

This is a precursor to the mass digitization program CBC plans to launch this summer during which close to one million English-language original program ‘carriers’ will be destroyed after being transferred to the latest digital media formats. 

This controversial plan flies in the face of international archival protocols that, because of the instability and insecurity of present-day digital media (think how frequently we are warned of ‘hacking’ threats’) requires the preservation of original content.

“The CBC’s digitization plan will be underway for five years”, said Kealy Wilkinson, Executive Director of the Canadian Broadcast Museum Foundation.  “Until we can gauge the reliability of the outcome, it would be foolhardy to destroy early generation copies like betacam - or original programs. 

It is up to the CBC and the Department of Canadian Heritage to halt any destruction.

Doing less risks the extinction of Canada’s national audiovisual history.”

The Canadian Broadcast Museum Foundation (CBMF) is a not-for-profit charitable foundation working in the public interest to preserve and provide public access to Canada’s history, culture and broadcasting heritage.

Media contact: Kealy Wilkinson, Executive Director, Canadian Broadcast Museum Foundation, Email: cbmf0fmcr@gmail.com, Phone: 416-367-4772.