War Of The Worlds was a book originally published by author H.G Wells in 1898. War Of The Worlds was broadcasted on the radio on October 30th 1938, this was in between both world war 1 and world was 2 and was the year prior to world war 2. the 1930’s was a decade full of unfortunate events, people across the world were still recovering from world war 1, the Great Depression and the Wall Street crash happened and dictators such as Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini gained power. Nazi Germany began to escalate and began its persecution of the Jews and people across the world were anticipating a second war. The 1930’s to the 1940’s was also considered the ‘Golden Age’ of radio and radio was the most used media platform in households across the world.

The War Of The Worlds broadcast was broadcasted in America by CBS radio and was part of The Mercury Theatre on the Air series, almost 80% of households in America owned a radio at this time. The drama performance of War Of The Worlds was adapted to sound like a present day live broadcast, it had no breaks and only had one announcement at the beginning of the broadcast to warn listeners that it was a play and not a real news broadcast, this meant that listeners tuning in mid-broadcast could become slightly confused. The broadcast is an early example of a hybrid-genre as it mixes conventions from H.G Wells’ science-fiction story and News / Documentary type broadcasts.

At the time of the broadcast American citizens will have been very on edge considering the events happening in the world around them; the anticipation of a second world war and the fact that it was Halloween night. The broadcast became famous for allegedly causing mass panic among its listeners however, many doubt the scale of panic that was claimed to have been made as the radio channel have relatively few listeners.

The War Of The Worlds is a historically significant media product as it was an early idea of how the media can persuade and effect peoples thoughts and views on the world around them and can influences a persons thoughts and feelings towards a specific thing whether it be political or an opinion on a book. The War of the Worlds broadcast is also considered an early form of ‘fake news’ as it supposedly had some members of the American public believing that there had been an alien invasion on earth.