“The War of the Worlds” is a radio broadcast from 1938 adapted from the H.G. Wells book of the same name. It was broadcast during the “Golden Age” of radio when mass media was starting to take off, but it was also broadcast during a time of great tension, anxiety and panic – the great depression and the rise of dictators like Hitler and Mussolini whose power in Europe provided people with fears of a looming world war, which indicated the presence of “hard times”, and as J.McDougall states in “Fake news vs. Media Studies”: “Hard times are a breeding ground for misinformation”. Orson Welles, in making the War of the Worlds broadcast, demonstrates to listeners the power of radio – how it can be used to manipulate as in Nazi Germany, where Hitler and his propaganda minister Goebbels made exhaustive use of radio’s power as a burgeoning domestic mass media form to broadcast “news” of Nazi propaganda. On the eve of war in 1938, Orson Welles attempted to show people how untruthful and manipulative media can be, as exemplified by his quote: “we wanted people to know that they shouldn’t take any opinion predigested, and they shouldn’t swallow everything that came through the tap whether it was radio or not”. Therefore, the war of the worlds is a highly influential and significant media product, as it is a pioneer of blurring the lines between fact and fiction, subverting the audience’s expectations of the genre of sci-fi and radio dramas. The broadcast employs cultivation theory by using the codes and conventions of genuine news reports multiple times to convince the listener that what they are listening to is actually real, while also exposing, in the vein of Barthes, how the professionalism of news reports does not mean they are more truthful or trustworthy than any other information source can be. 

The broadcast therefore also demonstrates how media institutions manufacture consent, linking with the ideas of Noam Chomsky, as with the broadcast of War of the Worlds Orson Welles creates a satire on how the media dominates power. By exposing how people react with panic if the “news” provides the audience with information about the atrocity of an event, he exposed how the media can spread misinformation and exposed the way the media in the United States often attempts to maintain the system and keep order.  

By increasing the verisimilitude of the broadcast by only telling viewers at the start of program that it is a fictional radio drama and presenting the broadcast partly as a series of simulated news reports that interrupts supposed regular radio programming, it constructs a representation of reality through fiction. It also reflects common fears of many people at the time, of war and invasion stemming from the growing authoritarian regimes throughout Europe, and as such the aliens can represent the fear of invasion of the USA by foreign powers, but also, to link in with Chomsky’s ideas and the critique of media institutions, the aliens can also represent the way the media utilises “wars on” or anti-communism to provide an enemy that is supposedly a threat to society in order to control the people. With this the audience can become far more immersed, as the use of radio allows the listener’s imagination to fill the visual gap with real life analogies. This is perhaps why many people supposedly took the broadcast as fact, not just due to its imitation of real news reports but also the wider social and political contexts the product exists in, which increases the verisimilitude of the product.

Overall, The War of the worlds is a very significant media product because it pioneered the use of verisimilitude and the subversion of traditional ideas of genre to critique the mass media institutions, but also to demonstrate to people and institutions how powerful radio can be, by showing how fake news can be interpreted as reality by undiscerning audiences.