The War of the Worlds in 1938

(“History of Fake News”- part 3)

Published in

Trudia

5 min readSep 14, 2018

Halloween evening 1938. Like every Sunday evening, the “Mercury Theatre on the Air” was playing on CBS Radio. But this time was different than the Sunday evenings before. The 23-year-old director of the show Orson Welles came up with something all-too-realistic. He adapted the science fiction novel “The War of the Worlds” by H.G. Wells.

First published in 1898, its one of the earliest science fiction stories. The novel is giving a detailed description of a conflict between mankind and an extraterrestrial race. This first-person narrative describes the Martian invasion of London and southern England.

In Orson Welles adaptation, Martian invaders landed near Princeton, New Jersey first. What looked like a strange meteor in the beginning turned out to be a spaceship! Out of the spaceship emerged a tentacled creature and blasted spectators with heat-rays. Soon after the Martian sunk back into the crater, it emerged again in a three-legged death machine accompanied with 7000 armed soldiers. Blasting communication lines and releasing a black toxic gas, the squad went swiftly to New York City!

That’s the summary of the radio show. Sounds a bit too fantastic for you? Well, Wells made a pretty good job. Millions of people believed this was actually happening.

In consequence, panic broke out across the country. Millions of terrified listeners jammed highways to escape the alien invasion. Other hid in cellars, hoping the poisonous alien gas would blow over them. It was reported that people were swooning and had been brought to the hospital.

Was made his show so real was the use of simulated on-the-scene radio reports interrupting the program. American radio audiences were used to such news bulletins. They had heard them often during the previous month with rising tensions to the developments in Europe. Welles usage of this kind of interruptions made his show seeming like something really happening. Welles applied sophisticated sound effects on to his show and employed actors doing an excellent job as terrified announcers or other characters.

Welles and his fellows performing amazingly well…

That’s the wildly reprinted narrative about the all-too-realistic radio show The War of the Worlds and a million listeners panicking.

A myth wandering around ever since that Helloween evening. But really? All that because of one well-produced radio show?

In fact, not that many people were listening to the show. Most people were listening to a highly popular comedy variety show called Chase and Sanborn Hour, playing at the same time like War of the World that evening. Coincidentally, a telephone poll was done that night. Approximately five thousand households were asked: “To what program are you listening”. Only two percent answered the question with The War of the Worlds.

CBS was never censored for The War of the World. According to Frank Stanton, later president of CBS, because:” In the first place, most people didn’t hear the show.”

Moreover, the show carried warnings that it was only functional at the beginning and after 40 and 55 minutes. So, the all-too-realistic show could be easily identified as fictional.

Wells in an interview with reporters… Was he out of his mind to do something like this??

In addition, Princeton’s Office of Radio Research sought to verify the rumor that several people had breakdowns and were treated in hospitals. None of the six surveyed hospitals had “any cases brought in specifically on account of the broadcast”.

Six weeks after the broadcast the American Institute of Public Opinion published a Research article about the event and its consequences. Later it turned out, that the figures of over one million people listening to the broadcast were wildly inaccurate. Although the surveyed people said they fled frightened, disturbed, or excited by the show, the research suggested that had felt “panicked” by The War of the Worlds.

It was claimed that such an event had a massive media resonance. Over 12.500 were allegedly published all over the world the month after the broadcast.

“Radio Listeners in Panic, Taking War Drama as Fact” said the front-page headline of the New York Times. But in fact, the coverage of the broadcast faded quickly after just one or two days.

In conclusion: it seems highly plausible the nearly nobody was fooled by Welles radio show.

Front page of The New York Times the day after

The question remains why the media coverage and the myth about that show differ so much from reality. One answer is that the broadcast gave Newspapers the chance to attract the radio as a medium. Editorials like “Terror by Radio” published in the New York Times were used to censor the relatively new medium of radio.

The radio had become a serious competitor in providing news and running advertisements.

Especially during the Depression, Radio had managed to gain lots of advertisement revenue and therefore badly damaged the classic newspaper industry. The print media took advantage of the broadcast to discredit the radio as a source of news. The goal was to show regulators and advertisers, that the management at the radio was irresponsible and not trustworthy. How could someone possibly let something like this happen if he or she represents a reliable and trustable source of information ? This is a perfect example of how media coverage changes when financial interest contradicting the goal of neutral reporting.Whether this strategy worked short-term or not remains unclear. But times were definitely not getting easier for newspapers. With television and the the internet entering the mass market for news, a steady decline of news outlets started. With newspapers steadily trying to adjust to those developments, it remains to be seen how the future of news and especially newspapers will look like.