Facts and Figures:

• The War of the Worlds was an episode of the radio series “The Mercury Theatre on the Air”, this was a radio series of live dramas which were created and hosted by Orson Welles in the United States and was originally released on July 11th to December 4th 1938.
• “The War of the Worlds” was specifically a Halloween radio episode which was performed and broadcasted live at 8pm until 9pm on October 30th 1938 and ran for 60 minutes (1 hour).
• “The War of the Worlds” episode instigated panic by convincing members of the public that specific events were taking place such as a Martian invasion although the episode only had few listeners so this did not become a global panic.
• According to Wikipedia, 6 million people heard the episode and caused 1.2 million to be frightened and disturbed. Although 30 minutes into the show before its first break, people still believed this.

• The episode was broadcasted over the CBS (Columbia Broadcasting company Radio Network. This radio network provided news to more than 1,000 radio stations throughout the United States and is owned by Paramount Global. CBS Radio was launched in 1927.

Theorists:

• George Gerbner: Created the Cultivation Theory and suggested that the theory’s key proposition is that “the more time people spend ‘living’ in the television world, the more likely they are to believe social reality aligns with reality portrayed on television.” and this links to War of the Worlds as most of the audiences who listened to the radio drama episode believed the stories which were mentioned causing the watchers to become disturbed and uncomfortable. I feel the main section which may have started the belief of the live drama was when producers interrupted the music to announce an important message e.g alien invasion from Mars (First announcement at 3:38)
• Stuart Hall developed the Theory of encoding and decoding and created ‘The Encoding/decoding model of communication’ which is a theoretical approach of how media messages are produced, disseminated, and interpreted. In terms of War of the Worlds,
• Harold Lasswell: Created the One step-flow of Hypothermic Needle theory which suggests that media explores information in such a way that it injects in the mind of audiences as bullets which causes different reactions to the media messages.