Government bureaucracy isn't noticably better. Everyone was writing over their tape archives back then, including the BBC (see: Doctor Who lost episodes) and, uh, NASA (the moon landings).
Governments might not be perfect, but they have a far, far better track record than for-profit corporations. The Library of Congress is one prominent example of archiving excellence. Many other public libraries and archives offer other examples.
I used to work on the Digital Archives at the Library of Congress.
It's not that they're exceptionally better at it. In fact, the Library has warehouses of materials that they still haven't cataloged, let alone organized or (better) digitized. Their primary focus has been the "sexy" projects like spool recordings, wax cylinders, etc that make for cool stories and mitigate decay (aka destruction) over modern material.
The big problem is that of collection. While in theory, anything that is a registered copyright in the US should be on file, most people don't take the time to register, let alone send off a copy.
The Library & National Archives aren't "better" at it.. it's that it's their primary purpose so the fact that they do it puts it above most other groups.
What I find telling of the US National Archives is that the unit of measurment for the collections (particularly the uncatalogued backlog) is millions of cubic feet.
Sure- if you choose to fund an archive! It's when you don't that you get things like the BBC taping over old episodes to save money. Without an actual dedicated archive (and $$$ to fund it) both corporations and governments will let stuff fall into the memory hole.
Even if you get funding for new media (why the BBC recording over things), someone has to be believe that material is important because reusing media is still cheaper and they'll use that budget elsewhere.
Sure, cost had a lot to do with it. For profit it not, archiving footage back then was expensive. And even those that did Dave forage ran the risk of having it burn up or simply degrade. There are lota of cases were someone tried to save records, only to have them rot, get eaten, get lost, etc.
"At the time Stokes began recording, television stations had been deleting archives for decades"
For-profit corporations can not be trusted to archive history.