Recorder:The Marion Stokes Project- and the echo of Black Lives Matters
2019 PBS Documentary 1hr 27min. Director Matt Wolf
Marion Stokes was an African American self styled activist and recluse who recorded several television channels, 24 hours a day for 35 years (*1975-2012 but in earnest from 1979, there are different counts from different sources) making a 70,000 VHS tape record of television history for that period. A history, TV networks did not even save. This included the 1979 Iranian Hostage Crisis, the start of CNN's 24 hour news channel and ended when she died while watching the Sandy Hook massacre coverage in 2012. Her son told her “her ride was here” (her driver) and she passed away, at that moment, all of recording devices were then turned off. Her story is about hidden realities and creeping media bias. A bias,it's like how a driving beat of music overwhelms a song lyric.
During the 444 day Iran Hostage incident she began to see patterns of bias as the reporting of facts of the story began to change during the ordeal. The running story was titled ,America Held Hostage an evolved message for dramatic effect, a daily tag line and a presidential election between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. There was a secret Canadian connection and a movie crew angle involved in the ever changing record of the event that still seems very murky. In the newspaper business this would be a tabloid news approach, but the TV medium could whip up tremendous drama and emotional impact for its audience. Protests, riots, burning and looting has great visual appeal. Television was also evolving a muted racism might have been a side effect.
This documentary has verified and opened my eyes to subtle changes that were running in the background all around me in a rejuvenated newspaper business when I started taking pictures in 1977. These somewhat decorative influences began to move television news ahead of printed newspapers in a slow but steady path towards extinction using old time newspaper techniques. Marion Stokes offers her truth about bias that could send today's newspapers on a different track. Stokes discovered what Black Lives Matters is now saying loud and clearly about race bias, hidden dual reality, stereotyping, media and institutional perpetuated bias with always ended in a forever hopeful twist. A twist that never really materialized.Policing may be the last barrier and chance at the grass roots level.
Simply speaking,people live in different realities totally unknown to each other resulting in bias, institutional racism and violence.Policing practices manages to crush progress and create enemies on a daily basis when they didn't need to.
True to her mission, Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project is bad television, the sound and picture quality of old VHS is an issue. She is not a TV communicator nor politician ,she is small,slight, quiet, some say nutty. She is no brand, but make no mistake, she is thoughtful, determined, and her words and thoughts are powerful even 40 years after speaking them. In today's context her determination and sense of right is undeniable.
Stokes and her second husband had a television show that looks much like community access programming where people of different races, religion and ideas would just talk. The idea was pretty simple, media has created and perpetuates stereotypes and people of different race and backgrounds had to live with stereotypes and misinformation about each other. Joe DiMaggio the Yankee Clipper would complain about sports stereotypes he had to live with created by newspaper sports writers. Bikers complained about the stereotype Hunter Thompson wrote about in his epic story, The Hell's Angels. Most stereotypes take decades to establish,in so many cases no longer exist as new generations come of age. Very different generations exist at the same time with very different ranges of power.
There was always the media narrative of heroes and honour in the struggle when people just wanted the struggle to go away.
Stokes got different people together to say what they felt about each other and to dispel falsely held beliefs. Media uses experts in Marion”s opinion that use technical language to exclude the masses of people from these important conversations. Her process driven ideas where reality based, a reality not often dealt with by political parties that control agendas nor media that fallow those agendas beyond funding and programs.
Understanding the realities is at the heart of the issue. While on a story at a remote First Nations community (decades ago I might have used the words Indian Reserve, language is being tailored to offer a changed view that signifies progress or to end one era of failure) I was seeing a lot of very nice twenty year old houses. I was also seeing outhouses on each property. I saw an old guy with grand kids pulling a sled to a artificial community water well. What I was seeing didn't register, but the fact was these houses were built by the government without running water nor sewer/septic systems.They had empty bathrooms with comodes and a bucket. Some houses had lake water coming out of taps but run off from the outhouses also ran into the lake in between the houses. No municipality anywhere in Canada would allow this practice. Having a middle class upbringing , it was something incomprehensible to me. It was a very different reality I had never encountered. From the outside things looked comparable to any cottage community in the south. The telltale signs ,I just skipped over.
The Winnipeg Free Press would do a major story years later on the lack of clean water by then the government had already began to service band housing.
One of the easiest ways to obscure reality is by changing the language around it. The word rape has being replaced by a very vague term, sexual assault which has many applications, it is also not as harsh sounding as word it replaces. Sounds better on TV and in print to sensitive readers. I bring this up not to argue the word but to show how the reality of the word changes in media. It is vague and soft sounding is a trend. Readers are insulated by word choice. Political correctness was beginning to develop.
Another example, in the same situation but different First Nation, I was shown a football sized field, with hundreds of burned and damaged cars and trucks. This remote community would not have a repair center nor car dealership/ nor service garage or even a franchised gas station. When ever a truck broke down, if it could not be moved, the owner would find it burned the next day. Years later, one of the band members was running a car crushing operation and having a great time flattening these wreaks. The back story around the vehicles was never really explored. These observations were a black swan event for me. How people on the margins live is something most have no knowledge nor comprehension unless they live in that reality.
Complicating the visual reality are the newer homes, and the beauty of the scenery that remote First Nations are set in. The realities are further complicated by the success of new housing and the arrival of water systems. Native people in exile to the city begin to return hoping to get a new house, making the housing and water problem more complicated. One chief would tell me they were now victims of their own success. Each reality varies, Stokes lived in the world of television, others faced very different realities including the failures of perception, bias, and created stereotypes she could see in a medium that reflects images of human observation. Often in a false or hopeful context, observations are repeated and reflected so often it becomes a truth. Hopeful endings in stories makes readerss feel better but often extend the suffering.
It's complicated is not an explanation nor a solution.
I was never more scared or in danger covering an inner city ,shooting gallery, a drug house, it windows covered, the main floor and upper floor littered with unconscious bodies of hard drug users. Myself and the landlord owner made our way in total darkness through the building stepping over the dozens of drugged and sleeping bodies, there was only one way in and out ,a realty that scared the hell out of me, it was an incomprehensible reality, seeing it for the first time.
There are somethings I never want to see again.
Today Black Lives Matters, and in Canada ,First Nations peoples live with the same issues of reality they face and that reality is not the same as perception seen through political,legal lenses by majority groups. When majority groups are confronted with smart phone images of the reality of injustice they are finally moved to act. It is a black swan event for them.
Marion also saw trends and she saw one with Apple computers, she saw computers as and empowering tool, she bought many types but Apple became her obsession , totally identifying with Steve Jobs and the company motto "to think differently."She instructed her family trust to purchase shares in the company at $7.00 per. The impression given that she was quit wealthy at the time.
Her approach was very “Sixties,” where the majority and media dealing in roll playing, stereotyping, creating and repeating images that support miss-information that are opposed to reality and openness that eventually boils over. These all supported by TV and Hollywood dramas We in media sit back and say where did that come from, but it was always there. If media hears of isolated incidents, they are probably not isolated.
Her collection would include examples of police brutality to blacks and how each channel would cover the story and what justifications might be offered. The number of incidents over a very long time would offer insight into attitudes by the press reflecting back to the majority as a time line.
Stokes would question how the on air news reader framed the journalism about to be aired. That framing in a seemingly off handed but often scripted way would change how the story would be perceived by implying local bias. I don't know how many times I heard the quip or set up for the story and started to imagine another way to take it in, as opposed to letting the reporter just tell what they knew.
In my experience, the photo caption in the newspaper would do the same thing on a smaller scale.
It may be about purity, but when it comes to the serious problems of race, one side gets a say and the other side has to live with it as a stereotype that gets built by small words connotations and attitudes adding up over time
In my photos “tight and bright,” people would be happy more often than not,that was the bright.
No one could be photographed smoking in a Winnipeg Free Press photo. The photo should not be interpreted as sexist, or not show heavy body types so people could be made fun of. A head shot could not be bigger than two columns. There were a lot of rules like that and some would come and some would go as the nine column format would give way to the six. In a way it was all bias. A predetermined limit on how things should look to the subscriber. The newspaper business is not a good example of diversity. BUT, the Free Press had one First Nations columnist that lived her life in the North End and wrote very personal columns dispelling many commonly held myths that I had heard since I was a kid. The Free Press covers aboriginal issues extensively and has a new aboriginal columnist. My self and others have made many trips to isolated reserves and those serviced by roads both near and far in Manitoba.
In general the papers where to “set a good example” for the public. There were great tolerances from one paper brand to another with competition. It was also bending to changing social norms and corporate image. Cameras and lens would get better and faster. There was a reluctance to show pain and suffering and only the bravest editor would face the storm to fallow.
Photos couldn't show too much reality, it was in a sense never leaving the 1950's media mentality. Many political protests would be, “photo only,” with no reporter,and the event would be classed as a stand up photo.
I thought of myself as a hard news photographer ,my ear was on the police scanner (scaners now silenced and the ear on the real world of local banned) and stood up for the harshest of news photography both mine and by others on staff, there was a lot of arguments and I had many “so called,” controversial photos published. I felt vindicated when they appeared in other newspapers or when they won awards and I know that was also a factor, and a bias. I had to explain photos in the context of story writing to make a point that could be understood. I wasn't wrong and the business was turning slowly in that direction anyway, but it was a daily battle.
With today in mind and the controversy around Black Lives Matter, we see that Marion made a good argument back in the 1980's for bias that was inherit in news media of the day. Ted Koppel's ABC Nightline 11:30 pm was the first example of tabloid TV she identified, eventually it had an audience of 7 million even though it competed with late night comedy/talk shows. This was a late night news program got Stokes attention for how television news was changing and how life and stories were being reflected back to the public.
The 444 day Iran Hostage incident got her started.That incident was the precursor to CNN's twenty four hour news cycle also starting in 1980 and known for its dramatic live coverage and criticized for being sensational and creating a false balance in being non partisan. It also made it's bones covering the 1991 Persian Gulf War and was first to cover the Sept.11 terror attack on New York City. In 2018 it had over 91 million households tuning in. For me, I always turned on CNN in the morning to see if the world had ended or not.
Today it's Breaking News ,the daily humour of it ,just kills me. Marion also noticed the distraction on the screens that still exist today, tickers, changing background colours that just seem to add movement.
What Marion Stokes says most eloquently is TV news/advertising and content is being designed and presented with a bias not only in the words being said but in the visual ques in presentation surrounding the content.Like newspapers a victim of over design. The power of advertising is now flexing is muscles in changing the name of the Washington Redskins NFL team. This power has always existed but has always been in the background of media.I have said earlier in posts that the combined TV product, news ads and content have consistent agendas. Agendas are changing.These are themes and bias constant through he entire product. Like it or not they are designed to move opinion along a certain line of thought or messaging. Generations of Canadians and Americans grew up with television, watch large numbers of hours a day.
Today the computer or smart phone screen is managing to capture a new young audience catering to functional convenience of access to all the knowledge of the world with the added surveillance feature. This surveillance features aggressive and intimidating monitoring, influencing, positive reinforcement reward, but also encourages pervasive group think that looks democratic but acts like a mob and influences a young impression group growing up in the medium not unlike opinionated boomers growing up with passive TV.
The messaging may be sinister in a authoritarian country, less sinister in democratic countries but messaging is defiantly by design of something in the background we all call “they.” They, say that this happened or that “they say,”this is true. A factoid. Without bias I am saying it happens by design and is neither good nor bad,left or right, liberal or conservative, all are bias that will signal to the self that their bias should be engaged. This is looking at each subject through a lens the general population believes is of ones own choosing.
Smart phone, evidence is also a feature and it is very powerful, so powerful that spoofing or false images are the next big thing to dispel truth telling. It seems seeing is believing but the still photography has already been compromised.
Messaging is pervasive, intentional and centralized and therefore undemocratic. We are seeing polarization where people are picking their lens from at least two categories.
This message profiling is turning to extremes that looks to most by now as conformist, undemocratic, dangerous, and an existential threat to freedom of information.
Marshall McLuhan's 1964 quote, “the medium is the message,” still carries weight.
This can only be seen by not listening to the message but looking at the pattern,and the pattern reveal the bias.
Even though I first started in Thunder Bay Ontario at the Chronicle Journal Times News (1977 to 1979) a midsize daily circulation Thomson chain newspaper then moving to the Winnipeg Free Press (WFP) in Manitoba (1979-2015) I was on the ground floor of major changes, possibly the newspaper business last stand and years before the popularization of the internet.
The newspaper business had discovered pictures and design. The years 1977 and 1979 marked the change for two newspapers I worked for going into brand new offset press buildings with better picture and colour capabilities and the business wanted to show them off as competition in two newspaper towns like Winnipeg was heating up. Competition brought it's own problems including the closing of newspaper across Canada to limit competition. The early eighties brought threats from the government in Canada and more change to the newspaper business.
I was trying to understand how I fit in to an ever changing media landscape in Winnipeg. The Television revolution going on and newspapers were in a renaissance period. At the same time with commercial and real life news images molding the evolution of the message and the mediums during a time of change, no one really noticed the cross effect. Advertising, entertainment and news were solidly hand in hand.
The newspaper business began to fight back after a decades of retreat from local TV news and and unhealthy indifference in general due to chain ownership and family owned companies that could no longer keep up with change. Inside the newsrooms it was very different, very lively, but also hamstrung , constricted in both big and small ways.
I have to say that I was moved by the Vietnam War and the US Civil Rights movement of the 1960's and especially the TV news footage on both the the six o'clock and eleven o'clock CBS news while I was in high school. There was a youth movement going on and it was all around me. Walter Cronkite would be replaced by Dan Rather. I was born at the right time. Media was very conservative and so were Canadians but that would be changing as the 60's and 70's progressed. There was, like today great sympathy for the overwhelming coverage of African American Civil Right movement and that over shadowed Canadian First Nations people. Stereotyping in Canada became institutional for First Nations issues that were easily hidden in the in the isolation of Canada's vastness. American news was just so easy and overwhelming.
There was also great hope for the power of American TV but also the fear that this media would overwhelm Canadian culture and in fact the world culture. Culture wars and real wars would occur because of those incursions. It may have been the 1968 Democratic Convention mayhem on the street of Chicago that planted the seed that, I could do that, I wanted to do that. It seemed possible that I could imagine myself wading into the chaos on the streets of where ever I ended up as a wire photographer shooting still photos. I never made it to the wire. I liked the idea of the single still photographer making my way toward the noise, moving with it,beside it and around it.
Marion was on the right track in so many ways. In so many ways she was ahead of her time. Now the disclaimer, the context and the bias of infused words begins at the end and not at the beginning. Decide for yourself if it would have made a difference in her credibility.
Marion Stokes as a black African American women who lived through the Civil Right's movement in the 1960's, the age of political assassination , the violent deaths of John F. Kennedy his brother Robert, and Martin Luther King and many others and there was the Cold War. Disillusioned, her first husband wanted to leave the US and live in Cuba and she says she was being groomed by the Soviet communists for propaganda purposes. Race conflict was know way back then to be the United States greatest threat to it's own security. She instead remained in the US, remarried ,lived a quiet life as a recluse and took on the video tape cause that she felt shaped public opinion in extraordinary and sometimes unhealthy ways. Her collection has been digitized and due to the early version of closed captioning feature can be searched. I recommend any journalist to seek out this PBS doc, it has a lot to say in the dullest way possible but I recommend it. Bias in media is a very bad thing in both big and small ways. We will all be better for hearing what she has to say. She believed that every generation would be better than the last. Opinion by Ken Gigliotti
Topic: The Marion Stokes Project and the Echo of Black Lives (Read 1523 times)