Remembered as history’s most infamous radio broadcast, a 1938 dramatization of H.G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds” reportedly caused widespread panic when listeners thought a fictional news broadcast of an alien invasion was real.
The day after the broadcast, sensationalist headlines ran from coast to coast: The New York Times placed “Radio Listeners in Panic, Taking War Drama as Fact” front and center, with the report beginning, “A wave of mass hysteria seized thousands of radio listeners throughout the nation.”
Other headlines read “Hysteria Sweeps Nation,” “Fake Radio ‘War’ Stirs Terror Through US,” and “Death Blamed on Radio Scare.” The radio play was blamed for panic in the streets, suicide attempts, and at least one fatal heart attack, reported by The Washington Post (but never corroborated or confirmed.)
The FCC would announce a probe of the incident, and one congressman would promise to introduce a congressional bill “controlling just such abuses as was heard over the radio last night …”
Even H.G. Wells himself felt moved to issue a statement that he “gave no permission whatever for alternations which might lead to the belief that it was real news.”
Fictitious news
The thing is … the mass hysteria likely didn’t happen at all.
In a 2013 article for Slate, Jefferson Pooley and Michael J. Socolow called into question this popular historical tale — recently perpetrated by a PBS documentary — noting evidence to discredit the sensationalist reports at the time: ratings data suggesting a tiny listenership (just 2% of 5,000 households surveyed), among other things.
In 1940, the initial media reporting was given academic legitimacy when Princeton Professor Hadley Cantril published the book “The Invasion From Mars,” which claimed a million Americans were “frightened” by the broadcast using flawed and misleading data.
Pooley and Socolow note that when a team of researchers for the book tried to prove claims of hospitals treating people for shock due to the broadcast, they found the claims false.
Radiolash
The real reason for this sensationalism, according to Pooley and Socolow?
It amounted to what was essentially a smear against radio, a new competing medium that was siphoning off advertising revenue from newspapers: “…the papers seized the opportunity presented by [Orson] 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.”
The general sentiment in the reporting was that an easily fooled public was tricked by an immature, irresponsible new medium — radio — that The New York Times said did not “master the materials it uses” and was in need of more (self) regulation. This sentiment was echoed by newspaper industry trade journal Editor and Publisher, which stated: “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.”
This dynamic makes sense and also gives context to the large number of erroneous reports in newspapers we’ve found blaming radio for all sorts of other things, including killing birds, poor grades, droughts, and skin rashes.
The old media were hostile to the new media, plus ça change.
A few concerned calls about a radio drama offered an irresistible opportunity to stick it to the meddling radio bros.
There certainly was a contagious panic about a strange invasion from the skies that posed an existential threat, but it didn’t happen on the streets or in the homes of America, and it wasn’t about aliens: it was about radio and occurred throughout newsrooms, a sort of radio derangement syndrome that possessed the media elites of the era who felt a new technology diluting their power, influence, and relevance.
This article was originally published on Pessimists Archive. It is reprinted with permission of the author.
We’d love to hear from you! If you have a comment about this article or if you have a tip for a future Freethink story, please email us at tips@freethink.com.
