war of the worlds

The article “The Invasion from Mars: Radio Panics America”, author and source unknown, is a review of the Orsen Wells’s, “War of the Worlds” phenomena, and the first mass communication study researching this event, Hadley Cantril’s (1940)The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic. The event referenced above was a dramatic radio broadcast of a fictional alien invasion. The broadcast aired on October 30th, 1938, and created wide spread panic among …

…the Wells’s broadcast and more by the social/political situation of the audience. Compound that with the naivete of the populace towards the belief that broadcasting was a “pure” medium, and we could see how such a panicked situation could occur. I wouldn’t argue that War of the Worlds was a brilliant broadcast, but I find it unlikely that any contemporary fictional mass communication could inspire such mass hysteria, no matter how brilliant.