05/25/2026
Marion Stokes spent more than 30 years recording television news nonstop, because she believed broadcasts were an important part of history that should be preserved exactly as they aired.
Starting in 1979, the former librarian and activist recorded multiple channels 24 hours a day from her home in Philadelphia, eventually collecting over 70,000 VHS tapes containing an estimated hundreds of thousands of hours of footage.
Her archive captured major world events, elections, wars, breaking news, cultural moments, and everyday broadcasts that may have otherwise been lost with time.
She didn't want anything edited, re-written or destroyed.
Marion Stokes continued recording until her death in 2012.
In the years since, her collection has been transferred to the Internet Archive, where thousands of tapes have been preserved and digitised so future generations can study and access historical television coverage as it originally aired.
