Round the Clock Coverage
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Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project is a documentary film by Matt Wolf about Marion Stokes, a Black librarian, collector, communist and television commentator, who recorded 24-hour-a-day television news on Beta and VHS cassette tapes from 1979, starting with the Iran hostage crisis, until her death in 2012. Stokes recorded multiple news channels at the same time on televisions and videocassette decks in her home in Philadelphia and created a collection of 71,716 tapes of local and national news recordings, which trace the early years and growth of CNN and Fox, as well as closed captioning technology and the decline of local cable network news. Wolf focuses mostly on Stokesâs life story, her relationships and family life, and how her family and friends perceived her and her documentation and collecting activities. Contemporary interviews are cut with news footage digitized from Stokesâs recordings and attempt to discern a motivation