Today is the 75th anniversary of Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast. Marc Wortman calls it “arguably the most widely known delusion in United States, and perhaps world, history”:
The New York Times front page story the next morning reported that “a wave of mass hysteria seized thousands of radio listeners throughout the nation…[leading them] to believe that an interplanetary conflict had started with invading Martians spreading wide death and destruction in New Jersey and New York.” But what made so many Americans so gullible? It was a case of the jitters, a nation primed to jump at the word “Boo!”
Jefferson Pooley and Michael Socolow calls this episode of hysteria a “myth”:
The supposed panic was so tiny as to be practically immeasurable on the night of the broadcast. Despite repeated assertions to the contrary in the PBS and NPR programs, almost nobody was fooled by Welles’ broadcast.
How did the story of panicked listeners begin?
Blame America’s newspapers. Radio had siphoned off advertising revenue from print during the Depression, badly damaging the newspaper industry. So the papers seized the opportunity presented by Welles’ program to discredit radio as a source of news. The newspaper industry sensationalized the panic to prove to advertisers, and regulators, that radio management was irresponsible and not to be trusted. In an editorial titled “Terror by Radio,” the New York Times reproached “radio officials” for approving the interweaving of “blood-curdling fiction” with news flashes “offered in exactly the manner that real news would have been given.” Warned Editor and Publisher, the newspaper industry’s trade journal, “The nation as a whole continues to face the danger of incomplete, misunderstood news over a medium which has yet to prove … that it is competent to perform the news job.”
The Dish 