It was a radio broadcast that marked media history, rocketing a 23-year-old to notoriety: his 1938 adaptation of H. G. Well’s novel “The War of the Worlds.”
That year, on the evening of Sunday, October 30, listeners who had tuned in to dance music on the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) radio network heard a news flash interrupt the “regular” program. A series of unusual explosions had been observed on the planet Mars, and a mass of hydrogen gas was moving towards Earth.
The broadcast went back to dance music. Another news flash interrupted the orchestra, to inform listeners that a strange object had landed in a field in rural New Jersey.
The entire broadcast, music and all, ran during an installment of the radio series “Mercury Theatre on the Air,” and in it, Orson Welles reworked H.G. Wells’ 1898 sci-fi novel, “War of the Worlds.”
In vivid detail, the live radio broadcast depicted a Martian invasion, with Welles using all the latest tricks known to radio broadcasting: interrupting programming with “special bulletins,” use of “experts” to lend credibility to the unbelievable news and emotional actuality from the scene of events.
The alien invaders seemed unstoppable, as they incinerated entire armies with their heat rays and sent choking clouds of gas into New York City. Broadcast nationwide, the program was reported to have caused mass panic in a number of cities.
Arguably, Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre troupe had set out only to entertain, not to deceive. But the broadcast has to be taken in the context of the times during which it was made. The world lived in fear that Germany was preparing for war. Across the Atlantic, in England, families were running gas mask drills.
As the broadcast progressed, people were calling the police, claiming they could see smoke in the distance rising from the battle with the aliens. Other people even reported to the police that they had seen the invading Martians. Some claimed that it was not Martians invading, but Germans.
But the real “” was spread the day after, when newspapers hyped up the panic and hysteria the program had created. That mass panic has now entered the public consciousness — even though research suggests it was highly exaggerated.
According to Michael Socolow, associate professor of Communications and Journalism at the University of Maine and co-author of a Slate article on the history of the phenomenon, newspapers saw an opportunity to discredit radio. Newspapers including the New York Times and the Boston Daily Globe ran a campaign to paint the new medium as an unreliable and irresponsible news source. But somehow the mass-panic myth has persisted.
Socolow sees several reasons explaining that: “The first is that it’s a great story,” he told DW. “The idea of a new media scaring people with an incredible and sensational broadcast is something we like to hear. It’s almost like a conspiracy theory. But the other reason I think we really like it is: It lets us laugh at audiences in the past and think that somehow they were much more naive than we are today.”
The power of a hoax
But, if you thought that trick could only be pulled off once, you’d be wrong.
An episode of New York public broadcaster WNYC’s acclaimed “Radiolab” program marking the 75th anniversary of Welles’ broadcast says the hoax was repeated in Quito, Ecuador, in 1949.
This time the panic was real. The streets filled with screaming, praying people. The army roared through the city in trucks and tanks, on their way to fight the Martians, thus increasing the panic. Once the show was over and people realized they’d been duped, fear turned to anger, and the crowds stormed the radio station, throwing rocks and breaking windows before setting fire to the building. Six people were killed.
Then in the late 1960s, the trick with “The War of the Worlds” was repeated on a radio station in Buffalo, New York, a city on the border to Canada. No deaths were reported, but panicked people called the police, and there are some reports that Canada deployed troops to secure a bridge.
Socolow says that because radio was a relatively new medium in 1938, it had not developed the same level of trust as the established printed media. But that doesn’t explain how the hoax could be repeated, and repeated again. Socolow explains that there is something in hoaxes and fake news which pushes our emotional buttons.
Internet and social media ideal vehicles to spread ‘fake news’
Nowadays, he says, the internet and social media constitute a new medium of communication that hasn’t built the same level of credibility as the more traditional media. That makes them ideal vehicles for the dissemination of “fake news” in today’s world.
But Socolow says the Welles broadcast sparked the first serious examinations of media credibility. “It really launched one of the great media literacy discussions in American history,” he says. “Hitler even quoted on it. Hitler made a joke about little green men from Mars invading countries! So it launched perhaps the world’s first large-scale discussion, where people really wondered about this idea of believing new media.”
Although Welles said in 1938 that the production had been intended simply as entertainment, in a 1955 interview with the BBC he revealed his motives had been quite different.
“When we did the Martian broadcast we were fed up with the way in which everything that came over this new magic box, the radio, was being swallowed,” he said. “So in a way our broadcast was an assault on the credibility of that machine. We wanted people to understand that they shouldn’t swallow everything that came through the tap.”
Of course, all of that that was a long time before Donald Trump started spreading the concept of fake news during his first presidential campaign, attacking “the lying media” and labeling anything critical of him as “fake news.”
And now the surge of AI-generated can lead to an even stronger erosion of public trust in the media and democratic institutions.
Michael Socolow says there is a common lesson to take out of it all.
“We should constantly be aware, we should be thinking about what it means to trust our sources of information,” he says. “And especially in an algorithmic universe, where social media platforms are curating our timelines only to show us things that they think we want. It’s now on us, the user or the viewer, or the reader to be much more skeptical, and we need to be discussing media literacy more. That’s what Welles was getting at.”
This is an updated version of an article from 2018.
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