Marion Stokes, a woman who from 1977 to 2012 recorded thousands of hours of news and tv show footage. Her primary objective was to “protect the truth” from fake news and to let people assess the archived material objectively.

She stored the tapes in 9 apartments and 3 storage units. Family outings were planned around the 6 hour tapes, making sure they were home to switch them out. In her later years she hired someone to do the recordings for her. Her final recordings include coverage of the Sandy Hook massacre

[Source](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes)

This is amazing but I can’t imagine how much this cost. Let’s say during the 80s she was buying for $3 per tape. That’s roughly $9 in today’s dollars. If she made 20k tapes in the 80s, that’s 60k of 80s dollars and 180k of ours – or roughly 18k per year on tapes.

Tapes didn’t get significantly cheaper in the 90s and God knows where she even found VHS tapes towards the end of her run but she plowed some serious money into this adventure.

I wonder if she had video of a fruit of the loom cornucopia.

It’s really endearing to see people do quirky stuff that ends up having a huge impact later on. Like a real life Forrest Gump

I found a forgotten sitcom amongst her recordings that I remember watching with my grandparents in the early 80’s. Such great memories.

Awesome. I recorded tons of am radio in the sixties.

Needed her at the BBC!

I was always wondering where people found old information from to compare to these new lies

Great job Marion

It’s like shrinkflation. I’m so glad when I see side by side pictures and happy people are calling out these greedy goblins of society

Keep making choices with your money

>The organization (internet archive) agreed to digitize the volumes, a process expected to run fully on round-the-clock volunteers, costing $2 million and taking 20 digitizing machines several years to complete. As of April 2022, the project is still incomplete, partially due to lack of funding.

That’s fuckin bullshit. This is something that the government needs to fund, this is extremely important.

I recorded the footage of the Russians amassing tanks on the Ukraine border and all the TV shows were they claimed they weren’t planning to invade. I did this for essentially the same reasons- document the actual news we had that day as it’s being reported.

Almost all clips from established (if not credible in cases) news outlets.

YouTube deleted them all as propaganda, when I appealed I got a response along the lines “this talk show said they weren’t going to invade, but they did so this is misinformation and propaganda”. I explained the whole point was to document the lies. No response

They deleted 3 of 10 half hour videos immediately, and I switched them to private so at least I had access to them- but over the last 3 years I’ll get a notice every few months they’ve deleted another.

Amazing. What a valuable asset.

She’s like a modern-day Pliney the Elder

Now that’s a fucking Accomplishment

Digitalized by who? 👀

Heroes. Thank you for sharing.

That’s incredible. Genuine question: was this a compulsion to document everything, just in the form of broadcasts? Or was this just something she was dedicated to doing to preserve history?

[Jacob Geller has a great video essay about media preservation that covers this](https://youtu.be/ukJ_UA-JS5o?si=vaV9tLFmUuUIEyyD)

It’s been 13 years and I still haven’t seen any of the tapes she recorded.

Also made a documentary: [https://recorderfilm.com/](https://recorderfilm.com/)

I found it on Hoopla

Because of this woman I can watch all the old SNL’s. Thank you so much Marion.

In France we have the INA which stores everything that was broadcasted.

I suppose there isn’t such an institute in the US,
Making her work useful ?

I somehow doubt it is the most complete