Today
Eighty years ago, Orson Welles revealed the terrifying power of fake news.
Orson Welles and the Birth of Fake News
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/30/o...fake-news.html
Many people believed his famous “War of the Worlds” broadcast — but many didn’t.
The difference offers a valuable lesson today.
On Oct. 30, 1938, Welles directed a radio adaptation of “The War of the Worlds,” re-imagining its Martian invasion through fictitious news flashes. Many contemporary newspapers claimed the show sparked a mass panic, sending multitudes of listeners fleeing their homes in fear.
But that stubbornly persistent narrative is false.
The myth of the “War of the Worlds” panic not only misinterprets how media persuasion and fake news actually work — it prevents us from understanding how to grapple with the problem today.
Over the past decade, a scholarly consensus has formed that the press grossly exaggerated the effects of Welles’s broadcast.
Only a small fraction of radio listeners mistook it for real news, and precious few did anything that could be described as “panicking.”
The better question, then, is why “The War of the Worlds” frightened some people but not others.
In 1938, the answer seemed clear.
Many scholars believed radio could, like a hypodermic needle, inject ideas straight into people’s minds, convincing them of anything — even something as fantastical as an alien attack.
Orson Welles rehearsing his radio depiction of H.G. Welles’s "The War of the Worlds."