Dedication

 

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.