War of the Worlds is an early example of a hybrid radio form, adapting the H.G Welles story using news and documentary conventions. The broadcast and the initial response to it has historical significance as an early, documented, example of the mass media apparently having a direct effect on an audience’s behaviour. The academic research carried out into the broadcast provided some of the early media audience research and the findings have been extremely influential in the media, advertising and political campaigning.

Media Institutions:

• War of Worlds was broadcasted by Columbia Broadcasting Company – an institution still in existence which is an American commercial broadcast television and radio network
• Radio broadcasting was in competition with print products such as newspapers which was previously the usual way to gather news
• Regulation – radio broadcasting was regulated by the Federal Communications Commission and it investigated the broadcast to see if it had broken any laws.

Media Audiences:

• Consider the way that external factors – global political context, gender, religion, education etc. – are likely to also affect audience response
• Cultivation theory including Gerbner
• The ways in which audiences interpret the same media product differently – at the time of broadcast and now (Reception theory including Hall)

-Poorer audio quality, longer more elaborate vocabulary to explain facts, maybe hinting towards the downfall of English language and understanding in correlation to the rise of technology.

-Radio being a place for education as this was in the “golden age”, one could suggest that this broadcast was the earliest ideal of fake news as lesser educated people would listen in and maybe not understand the idea of satiricalism, or sci-fi fiction.

Even the two-step flow model of communication provides some insight into how the panic unfolded. For instance, a “throng of playgoers had rushed” from a “theatre” because “news” of the invasion had “spread” to the audience. The New York Times also reported how the “rumour” of war “spread through the district and many persons stood on street corners hoping for a sight of the ‘battle’ in the skies”. Therefore, not everyone who was terrorised by the radio play was actually listening to the broadcast. They heard the rumours from people they trusted in their social circle.

How did the public react?

• According to RadioLab, about 12 million people were listening to the broadcast and 1 in every 12 people thought it was true, with some percentage of that 1 million people ran out their homes
• Morning Edition, for instance, reported in 2005 that “listeners panicked, thinking the story was real.” Many supposedly jumped in their cars to flee the area of the “invasion.”
• There’s also this report from PBS-TV’s American Experience, which says that “although most listeners understood that the program was a radio drama, the next day’s headlines reported that thousands of others plunged into panic, convinced that America was under a deadly Martian attack.”

Quotes from the broadcast:

• “At twenty minutes before eight, central time, Professor Farrell of the Mount Jennings Observatory, Chicago, Illinois, reports observing several explosions of incandescent gas, occurring at regular intervals on the planet Mars.”
• “It is reported that at 8:50 P. M. a huge, flaming object, believed to be a meteorite, fell on a farm in the neighborhood of Grovers Mill, New Jersey, twenty-two miles from Trenton.”
• Phillips: “And what did you hear?”
  • Wilmuth: “A hissing sound. Like this:ssssss . . . kinda like a fourth of July rocket”
  • “I don’t know what to think. The metal casing is definitely extra-terrestrial . . . not found on this earth. Friction with the earth’s atmosphere usually tears holes in a meteorite. This thing is smooth and, as you can see, of cylindrical shape.”
  •  “Ladies and gentlemen, this is the most terrifying thing I have ever witnessed . . . Wait a minute! Someone’s crawling out of the hollow top. Someone or . . . something. I can see peering out of that black hole two luminous disks . . are they eyes? It might be a face. It might be . . .”
  •  “Ladies and gentlemen, I have a grave announcement to make. Incredible as it may seem, both the observations of science and the evidence of our eyes lead to the inescapable assumption that those strange beings who landed in the Jersey farmlands tonight are the vanguard of an invading army from the planet Mars.”