Broadcast 21 November 1972
From a tape in the CBC Radio Archives, reference no. 721121-8, transcribed by Monika Lee. The program was produced by Elspeth Chisholm, who had helped Innis with his unpublished History of Communications. Chisholm commented on the way that the ideas of the liberal Innis, who died in 1952, were now being adopted by both neo-Marxist economists and communications theorists like Marshall McLuhan. Frye’s contribution to the program is brief:
CHISOLM: Professor Northrop Frye is a literary critic and a commissioner for the CRTC. He has long thought that Innis’s theories were central to any communications philosophy.
FRYE: This is something that naturally interests both historians and theorists of language, so that Innis, like Hegel, is a person who has both left-wing and right-wing disciples. I don’t think that you could find greater contrasts in outlook and temperament in the University of Toronto than between, say, Marshall McLuhan and Donald Creighton, and yet both of them have been very strongly influenced by Innis.