War of the Worlds is a drama, and it uses the codes and conventions of a news broadcast in order to make a made up explosion and invasion of aliens seem like a real world issue and crisis.

Media Institutions

War of the Worlds was broadcast by Columbia Broadcasting Company – an institution still in existence

At the time, radio and broadcasting was seen as direct competition to newspapers.

The broadcast heavily shows that institutions are always looking for new styles of products to make to attract new audiences.

Regulation – radio broadcasting was regulated by the Federal Communications Commission and it investigated the broadcast to see if it had broken any laws.

The broadcast shows the effect of individual producers on media industries (known as ‘auteur theory’) 

Media Audiences

Stuart Hall – Preferred reading – Dominant reading would be to acknowledge the broadcast as not real and a work of fiction, while other people took it very seriously and it greatly affected their lives.

Cultivation theory – Gerbner stated that if enough content is produced with a certain agenda is produced, people will accept it as reality – Radio was growing so much in the 1930s, and so people were unclear whether radio itself could ever consist of lies.

CBS likely exaggerated impact of War of the Worlds for marketing and publicity purposes – people didn’t actually kill themselves and believe martians were invading – according to Jean Baudrillard’s theories around postmodernism. He states that “people lose the ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy.

CE Hooper rating survey conducted 12 hours after the program went live found 98% of the people at the time weren’t listening. Of the 2%, no one took it as a legitimate news broadcast.

This shows that the dominant reading as depicted by Hall’s theory of preferred reading is that people treated it as fake.