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In a quest to protect the truth, the activist Marion Stokes recorded television twenty-four hours a day for thirty years on more than seventy thousand tapes. She started in 1979, during the Iran Hostage Crisis — now considered the birth of the twenty- four-hour news cycle — and ended on the day of her death, as news of the Sandy Hook Massacre first broke. In between she captured revolutions, catastrophes, talk shows, sitcoms, lies, triumphs, and commercials that tell us who we were and how television shaped our world today. Filmmaker Matt Wolf has compiled a sequence of images, culled from over seven hundred hours of Marion’s tapes, that capture the texture of the past and express the subliminal power of televisual life.