By: Cynthia Meyers

Cynthia Meyers — Wed, 15 Jul 2015 17:31:24 +0000

This problem of media artifacts being separated from their contextual documentation (production, distribution, reception, etc.) is not limited to educational broadcasting artifacts, as any media historian can attest! But joining contextual documents to media artifacts is not a simple process because the pieces are often scattered among many depositories and collections. Often personal collections include documentation that institutions didn’t bother to save, requiring historians to do extensive detective work! This problem is even more acute for media artifacts for which authorship is unknown, elusive, or collaborative such as advertising.

BTW, I hope that historians of educational broadcasting also look at the work of sponsors like DuPont and ad agencies like BBDO in developing “educational” programming such as “Cavalcade of America”–which featured Hollywood stars in docudramas aimed to appeal to audiences while simultaneously educating them about American history. Instead of dismissing such sponsored programs as “commercial,” it might be useful to think of them as a part of the origin of “educational” programming–programming designed to educate, uplift, and “improve” mass audiences.

I think a genealogy could probably be traced from sponsored “corporate image” radio programs (such as General Motors’ “Parade of States” produced by BBDO) to 1950s educational television then to underwritten PBS television broadcasting programs. I’d guess that since 1960s network program control booted sponsors committed to cultural uplift programming (GE, DuPont, ATT, Firestone) from network schedules, “public” broadcasting then became the major outlet for such programming (sponsored by corporate image advertisers like Mobil, etc). Just a thought.

Comments on: Audiovisual Archives and the Context Conundrum

By: Cynthia Meyers