On more then one occasion I have reported on HPANWO that a media
story appears and later disappears. These transient soundbites are often widely
remembered by a large number of people, leaving no doubt that they happened;
but all records of them vanish. They are never repeated again and later cannot
be found in the schedules. A good example was the death of Osama bin Laden...
the third one. I watched an anti-terrorism expert from the
US
embassy in
London say that the
earthly remains of Osama bin Laden would definitely be taken to the
United
States where they would be displayed to
selected members of the press. Later it was announced the Al-Qaeda leader had
been buried at sea and I've never been able to find that interview anywhere, see:
https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2024/01/no-easy-day.html.
In 1966 during the Westall UFO landing in
Australia
the local TV news channel covered the story, interviewing witnesses and
capturing footage of the site; but later investigators found that the tape was
inexplicably missing from the studio archives. These days it is both easier and
harder to keep our own records of contentious historical events. The internet
means we can screen capture, upload and download whatever we like. But at the
same time the rise of streaming services, electronic newspapers and the lack of
home media makes the Memory Hole larger and closer. Obviously if Jane Stanley's
WTC7 gaff had happened twenty years easier we would never know about it and
those who recalled seeing it at the time would be accused of lying and
confabulating... Or would they? You see, from as early as 1977, when the first
home video recorders came on the market, a young woman from
Philadelphia,
USA started creating her
own archive of TV channels, especially the news. Marion Stokes was a TV
producer and librarian; she was also a civil rights activist, communist and
feminist (Well, nobody's perfect). She was so concerned by the danger of fake
news and censorship that she decided to preserve televisual history herself by
making continuous recordings of all the TV channels that she could. This was before
the days of internet on demand services. The only way she could do this was
record them using VCR's. She had eight of these running continuously and used
to plan her entire daily routine around the need to go home to change over the
tapes. When she got older her family and friends helped her do this. She made
over 71,000 recorded six hour VHS tapes; that's about 400,000 hours or over forty-five
years of continuous television coverage. She ran out of space at home,
obviously, and so rented flats and storage huts to keep them in. Source:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-us-canada-48190528.
Towards the end of her life she bought a number of computers
and perhaps had plans to convert the tapes to digital files herself, but she
never managed this. Her collection includes such significant events as the
Iran
hostage crisis, 9/11 and, one of the last things in it, the
Sandy
Hook massacre. Her son claimed that she had always been a
compulsive hoarder and so it was this obsession mixed with her political
beliefs that inspired her to put so much time, money and effort into her
project. She also had a huge collection of books, newspapers and children's
toys. When she died her tapes were donated to the Internet Archive and there
has been an ongoing project to convert and upload them. No doubt this will take
some time and right now it remains incomplete; but here are the pages:
https://archive.org/details/marionstokestexts
and:
https://archive.org/details/marionstokesvideo.
The tapes needed several shipping containers and lorries to transport them and
they are being kept in a big warehouse. People like Marion Stokes do the world
and humanity a great service. We live in a society where the media is exactly
what she feared it was, an Orwellian Ministry of Truth. I have discovered this
for myself. It's not just the news and current affairs that have suffered; it
is arts and entertainment. Some items are not lost through malicious
suppression, but mere accident and neglect. A good example is the quest to find
the missing episodes of
Doctor Who,
see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes.
Marion is not the only home
recorder to have saved vital documents that would otherwise have been lost
forever; here's another example:
https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2020/09/a-small-problem.html.
However,
Marion is surely the most
dedicated and conscientious. Only when we have pored through her volumous
library, and that will take a lot of people a long time, will we truly grasp
the magnitude of her achievement. I'd be willing to bet a lot of money that we
will find some things in there which will make our jaws hit the floor. They
will be things that exist nowhere else and will be things eliminated from all
official records. Rest in peace,
Marion.
