Article,
The Bias Against Communication: On the Neglect and Non-Publication of the 'Incomplete and Unrevised Manuscript of Harold Adams Innis
Canadian Journal of Communication, 26 (2): 211--229 (2001)
Abstract
Harold Adams Innis's A History of Communication has attained almost mythological status within his oeuvres and is widely recognized as an important repository of his ideas. Yet the work (numbering 2,400 pages) has never been published, and its significance for understanding Innis's scholarship has yet to be assessed. This article examines why a number of efforts to publish the work met with failure, giving particular attention to a venture supported by the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission in 1969-1970 as viewed through the eyes of Mary Quayle Innis and those advising her (particularly Northrup Frye, Donald Innis, and George Ferguson). The article concludes with an overview of the manuscript's contents along with some of the organizing principles that underpinned the empirical material that Innis presents. Such an exercise, the author argues, is essential if one is to address whether the document merits publication in some form
