Imagine having access to every news broadcast that has aired on television for over three decades. For most people, this might sound like an impossible task. But for Marian Stokes, a former librarian and television producer, this became her life’s mission. From 1979 to 2012, Stokes obsessively recorded news broadcasts, capturing over 70,000 VHS tapes worth of footage. At a time when people consumed news passively, she anticipated a future where access to information would become increasingly important, even essential. Her work stands as a precursor to today’s digital age, where everything seems to be archived at our fingertips.
Stokes’ life was marked by activism, a deep concern for media representation, and a desire to preserve the truth. Born in 1929, she grew up in a world shaped by segregation and racial discrimination. This environment influenced her lifelong commitment to social justice. She became involved in the Civil Rights Movement during the 1960s, advocating for equality and pushing back against injustice. It wasn’t long before her political activism blended with a fascination for media and how it could shape public perception.
During the 1970s, long before 24-hour news channels or social media existed, television news was finite and carefully scheduled. Viewers had to tune in at specific times or risk missing major stories. Stokes began to notice the power the media had in shaping the narrative. What if they misrepresented something, or chose not to cover it at all? For Stokes, this was a problem. She feared that those in power could control the truth, and she saw a need to document news broadcasts before they vanished into the ether.
It was the Iranian Hostage Crisis in November 1979 that sparked her project. Stokes had already transitioned from being a librarian to producing local television in Philadelphia. Glued to the television as the crisis unfolded, she realised how easily major news events could be lost or misrepresented. So she began recording. Initially, it may have been a response to one event, but it soon became an obsession. She set up multiple VCRs in her home, recording the news 24 hours a day, every day, across several major networks.
For the next 33 years, Marian Stokes recorded just about every major event that unfolded on the news. From the fall of the Berlin Wall to the 9/11 attacks, she captured it all. But it wasn’t just the big events; she also recorded smaller local stories and even the commercial breaks, preserving the everyday context of American life. To her, she was “preserving the truth”—creating an unfiltered record of how history was reported in real-time.
To outsiders, her dedication may have seemed obsessive. Her home was filled with VHS tapes and multiple TVs, all running simultaneously, recording everything that aired. But Stokes had a clear purpose. She believed in the importance of maintaining an unbiased archive of news. She didn’t trust corporate media to do that for the public, so she created her collection.
Today, the Internet Archive has digitised and stored her recordings, offering a unique resource for historians, journalists, and anyone interested in how media has shaped public understanding over the years. In an era where misinformation and “fake news” are constant concerns, Marian Stokes’ archive stands as a testament to the role the media plays in shaping reality.
