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Marion Stokes was a librarian and civil rights activist who recognized the power of the media long before the era of "fake news."
In 1979, during the Iranian Hostage Crisis, she noticed how news narratives shifted and were often discarded by networks. Believing that history would one day be "erased or rewritten," she began a monumental archival project.
For the next 33 years, Stokes recorded television 24 hours a day. Using up to eight VCRs at a time, she captured everything: news cycles, commercials, and talk shows. Her obsession was relentless; she even timed meals and outings around the need to change tapes every six hours. To fund her mission and house the growing mountain of media, she used wealth gained from early investments in Apple stock, eventually filling nine apartments with over 70,000 VHS and Betamax tapes.
Stokes died in 2012, recording until her final moments. Her son donated the massive collection, totaling over 800,000 hours, to the Internet Archive. Today, this "guerrilla archive" serves as a permanent, unedited record of American history, ensuring that the truth remains preserved exactly as it was first broadcast.