he was the one radio broadcast It marked the media history that catapulted 23-year-old Orson Welles to notoriety: his 1938 adaptation of H.G. Wells’s novel “The War of the Worlds.”
That year, on the evening of Sunday, October 30, listeners listening to dance music on the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) radio network heard a news flash that interrupted the “regular” program. A series of unusual explosions were observed on Mars, and a mass of hydrogen gas was moving toward Earth.
The broadcast went back to dance music. Another news flash interrupted the orchestra, informing the audience that a strange object had fallen in a field in rural New Jersey.
The entire broadcast, music and all, ran during an installment of the radio series “Mercury Theater on the Air”, and featured Orson Welles reworking HG Wells’s 1898 sci-fi novel, “War of the Worlds”.
In elaborate detail, the invasion of Mars was depicted in live radio broadcasts, in which Welles used all the latest tricks known to radio broadcasting: interrupting programming with “special bulletins”, using “experts” to lend credibility to the emotional reality of unbelievable news and visual events.
The alien invaders seemed invincible, as they incinerated entire armies with their heat rays and sent suffocating clouds of gas over New York City. This program, broadcast across the country, was reported to have caused widespread panic in many cities.
Arguably, Orson Welles and his Mercury Theater troupe were out only to entertain, not deceive. But the broadcast has to be taken in the context of the time during which it was made. The world was living in fear that Germany was preparing for war. Across the Atlantic, in England, families were running gas mask drills.
As the broadcast was progressing, people were calling the police and claiming that they could see smoke rising from a distance due to a fight with aliens. Other people also informed the police that they had seen the attacking Martians. Some claimed that the invaders were not Martians, but Germans.
But the real “fake news” was spread the next day, when newspapers publicized the panic and hysteria created by the program. That widespread panic is now seared into the public consciousness – even though research shows it was greatly exaggerated.
According to co-author Michael Sokolow, associate professor of communications and journalism at the University of Maine slate Writing articles on the history of the incident, newspapers saw the opportunity to discredit the radio. newspapers including new York Times and this boston daily globe Wage a campaign to portray the new medium as an unreliable and irresponsible news source. But somehow the myth of mass terror persists.
Sokolow sees several reasons to explain this: “First of all, it’s a great story,” he told DW. “The idea of new media scaring people with unbelievable and sensationalist broadcasts is something we love to hear. It’s almost like a conspiracy theory. But the other reason I think we really love it is this: It makes us laugh at audiences in the past and think that somehow they were more naïve than they are today.”
power of deception
But, if you think that this trick can be used only once, then you are wrong.
An episode of New York public broadcaster WNYC’s acclaimed “Radiolab” program marking the 75th anniversary of Welles’s broadcast stated that the hoax was repeated in Quito, Ecuador in 1949.
This time the nervousness was real. The streets were filled with people screaming and praying. The army was moving into the city in trucks and tanks to fight the Martians, increasing the panic. Once the show ended and people realized they had been duped, fear turned to anger and the mob stormed the radio station, throwing stones and breaking windows and setting the building on fire. Six people were killed.
Then in the late 1960s, “The War of the Worlds” stunt was repeated on a radio station in Buffalo, New York, a city on the Canadian border. No deaths were reported, but panicked people called police, and there are some reports that Canada deployed troops to secure a bridge.
Sokolow says that because radio was a relatively new medium in 1938, it had not developed the same level of trust as established printed media. But this does not explain how deception could be repeated, and repeated again. Sokolow explains that there is something about rumors and fake news that pushes our emotional buttons.
Internet and social media are ideal mediums to spread ‘fake news’
Nowadays, he says, the Internet and social media are a new medium of communication that has not built up the same credibility as more traditional media. This makes them the ideal medium for the spread of “fake news” in today’s world.
But Sokolow says the Wells broadcast posed the first serious test of media credibility. “It really started one of the great media literacy discussions in American history,” he says. “Hitler even quoted it. Hitler made a joke about little green people from countries invading Mars! So it probably started the world’s first large-scale discussion where people were actually surprised about this idea of believing in new media.”
Although Welles said in 1938 that the purpose of the production was only entertainment, in an interview with the BBC in 1955 he revealed that his purposes were quite different.
He said, “When we did the Martian broadcast we were fed up with this new magical box, the radio, that was swallowing up everything that came on.” “So in a way our broadcast was an attack on the credibility of that machine. We wanted people to understand that they shouldn’t swallow everything that comes through the tap.”
Of course, this all happened a long time ago when Donald Trump began spreading the concept of fake news during his first presidential campaign, attacking the “lying media” and labeling any criticism of him as “fake news.”
And now the rise of AI-generated deepfakes could lead to an even greater decline in public trust in the media and democratic institutions.
Michael Sokolow says there’s a simple lesson to be learned from all this.
“We must be constantly aware, we must think 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 just to show us the things they think we want. Now it’s on us, the user or the viewer, or the reader, to be more skeptical, and we need to have more discussions on media literacy. That’s what Wells was saying.”
This is an updated version of a 2018 article.