War of the Worlds
On the evening of October 30, 1938, the radio station CBS broadcast a special report on a series of explosions on Mars, followed by a landing of a cylindrical object on a farm in New Jersey. In a live coverage on the scene, commentator Carl Philipps and the renowned astronomer Professor Richard Pierson witnessed creatures crawling out of the object. An attempt to pacify them, by waving a white handkerchief, failed. In a succession of further reports and announcements from newsreaders and officials, the overall picture of a Martian invasion emerged. When all military efforts to stop the invaders remained unsuccessful, the inhabitants of New York City were urged to evacuate.
As the attentive listener of the program should have noticed, this was all part of a fictional radio play by Orson Welles in which he moved H.G. Wells’ novel “The War of the Worlds” to the area of Greater New York and the 1930s. However, the stylistic device of conveying the story through fictitious news reports and official announcements worked so well that many listeners took it for real. This led to numerous calls at local police stations, attempts to flee the city, allegedly crowded highways, and other reactions that one may expect in the event of an actual extraterrestrial visit.
The classification of the public reaction as a “mass panic” was challenged by recent historical research arguing that newspapers exaggerated the events in order to cast doubt on the reliability of the radio as a source of information. Indeed, at the time of the broadcast, there appeared to be good reasons to be cautious about the effects of the rise of the radio in modern mass communication, over and above the denigration of a competitor on the news market. Not least, radio propaganda played a central role in the spread of the Nazi ideology in Germany. Motivated by the observation that installing fear and anxiety may have helped the Nazis, the perception of Welles’ radio play caught the interest of a group of researchers at the Institute for Propaganda Analysis in Princeton, among them Hadley Cantril. In their study “Invasion from Mars”, based on survey data and interviews, the authors estimate that the broadcast was followed by 6 million listeners, 1.7 million of which believed that they were listening to a news bulletin, and 1.2 million of the latter reporting to be “frightened or disturbed” as a consequence. They suggest that due to the war scare and the prolonged economic depression, parts of the listeners perceived the staged invasion to be just another radio report on an event “beyond their control and comprehension”, fueling their suggestibility to accept any interpretation offered by the radio speaker. The design and the results of the study have later been criticized. However, as the recent discourse about “fake news” illustrates, their research question has not lost any of its relevance.
Author: Timm Dusemund
Sources:
Adena, Maja, Enikolopov, Ruben, Petrova, Maria, Santarosa, Veronica, & Zhuravskaya, Ekaterina (2015): Radio and the Rise of the Nazis in Prewar Germany; The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 130(4); 1885-1939.
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Cantril, Hadley (1940): The invasion from Mars: A study in the psychology of panic; Princeton University Press.
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