INSTITUTION

Performed live in 1938, the radio drama depicted a Martian invasion of earth, but the broadcast allegedly provoked widespread panic because many listeners thought the attack was real

 “The War of the Worlds” was aired by Columbia Broadcasting Systems (an institution still in existence (in a very different form) today.)- CBS frequently interrupted scheduled programmes to inform their listeners of the latest updates from Europe. In the weeks prior to “The War of the Worlds” episode, the network reported on Hitler’s continued occupation Czechoslovakia and the inevitability of another global conflict.

Authors were Orson Welles and Howard Koch

Performed and broadcast live at 8 pm ET on October 30, 1938 over the CBS Radio Network

Gerbner’s Cultivation Theory, the two-step flow model and Stuart Hall’s Reception Theory

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

AUDIENCE

What techniques (ie Media Language) does the broadcast use to convince the audience that what they’re hearing is really happening?

Consider the way that external factors – global political context, gender, religion, education etc. – are likely to also affect audience response

The hypodermic needle theory suggests a media text can have a powerful and immediate effect on the passive audience. It would seem “The War of the Worlds” production supports this argument because so many terrified listeners, for example, “rushed out of their houses” to escape the “gas raid”

FACTS

• The War of the Worlds- an episode of the radio series “The Mercury Theatre on the Air”- was a radio series of live dramas which were created and hosted by Orson Welles in the United States. Originally released on July 11th to December 4th 1938.
• “The War of the Worlds”- Halloween radio episode which was performed and broadcasted live at 8pm until 9pm on October 30th 1938 and ran for 60 minutes (1 hour).

Context- On Oct. 30, 1938 millions of Americans tuned their radios to the weekly dramatic program “Mercury Theater of the Air” to listen to War of the Worlds a science fiction novel by H.G. Wells about an invasion from Mars. When Orson Welles adapted the story for radio he made it sound like a news broadcast, with actors playing reporters. Many people in the audience thought the “invasion” was real, and the broadcast caused a panic. Some people hid in their cellars, while others loaded guns or wrapped their heads in wet towels to protect themselves from Martian poison gas.

Quotes-  “The world is not coming to an end. Trust me.”

CE hooper rating survey- 98% weren’t actually listening to War of the Worlds- Radio lab broadcast of War of the Worlds from 2018

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.

Media Institutions:

• 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.

Linked Theories

Gerbner cultivation theory and behavioural psychology.

Mean World Syndrome, War of the worlds illustrates an example of this theory, it cultivates a heightened sense of fear in society. A society still relatively new to radio, many people would be listening with blind naiveness, watching and consuming this form of media not knowing what is true or not, so the more they listened to it, the more likely they were to hold a view of reality that is closer to radios depiction, to unsuspecting listeners, they were victims to fake news and a deception of reality.

The radio drama episode believed the stories which were mentioned were true, by interrupting music mid broadcast for strange alien encounters.

The hypodermic needle theory links to war of the worlds as it supports the idea that people are passive consumers and are victims to the tremendous influence of the early stages of media. Proven by quotations such as: “rushed out of their houses” to escape the “gas raid”.

Cultivation theory links as the newly heavy influence of new media production has had a large influence on the public as people actually rose to believe the radio and it’s scary nature. It can explain the nature of the hysteria. Gerbner’s research suggested heavy users of television become more susceptible to its messages, especially if the texts resonate with the viewer.

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.

Media Institutions:

• 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.

• A famous episode due to the fact is ensued panic on those who listened, them thinking there was an actual Martian invasion of Earth taking place.
• The program is a simulation of a “live event” where it plays bulletins as if it were a real radio being interrupted by an emergency broadcast.
• “The War of the Worlds” was the 17th episode of the CBS Radio series The Mercury Theatre on the Air, which was broadcast at 8 pm ET on October 30, 1938, making this a Halloween special.
• The scare was intended with the Narrator and Director “Orson Welles ” said  “and would be broadcast in such a dramatized form as to appear to be a real event taking place at that time, rather than a mere radio play”
• Out of an estimated 6 million listeners, 1.7 million believed the story and 1.2 million got disturbed/scared. Even thought 30 minutes through the show, an announcement was made saying it was just a story.

Linked Theories

Gerbners idea that what people listen or watch, slowly becomes what they actually think or believe. Which in this case is the people who were scared or frightened, not listening to the announcement that it was fake and paying attention to the start/finish and name of the broadcast being The Mercury Theatre on the Air.

Halls idea is the multiple types of audience that listen to the war of the worlds. Each with their own set of reactions. Firstly, Dominant, or Preferred Reading – how the producer wants the audience to view the media text. The creator of war of the worlds wanted the audience to understand and be entertained by a documentery/story piece.

Oppositional Reading – when the audience rejects the preferred reading, and creates their own meaning for the text. In this case it would be people running out of their houses with their families.

Negotiated Reading – a compromise between the dominant and oppositional readings, where the audience accepts parts of the producer’s views, but has their own views on parts as well. In this example it would be people getting frightened of the piece and turning it off.

Lasswells 5 forms of communication.
who said it: Columbia Broadcasting Company
what was said: A story based on the idea Martians were arriving on earth.
in which channel it was said: Radio
to who it was said: A radio audience of 12 million people
what effect it had when it was said: 6 Million scared or frightened, with 1.2 million going to the lengths of running out with their families in fear.

Fake news

Fake news started and was made consistently since 1755, so in this case it was not an abnormal thing to be broadcasted or seen.

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.”

War of the worlds was originally a book published in 1898

Orson Welles narrated the broadcast in 1938 radio drama, he explained to reporters that he had no intention to cause a panic. October 31st, 1938

original release: October 30th, 1938, 8 – 9 pm ET

The war of the worlds was a Halloween episode of the radio series The mercury theatre on the Air directed and narrated by Orson Welles as an adaption of H . G. wells novel The war of the worlds. It was performed and broadcasted live at 8 pm ET on October 30, 1938 over the CBS Radio Network.

The second portion of the show shifts to a conventional radio drama format that follows a survivor (played by Welles) dealing with the aftermath of the invasion and the ongoing Martian occupation of Earth. 

Some listeners heard only a portion of the broadcast and, in the tension and anxiety prior to World War II, mistook it for a genuine news broadcast. Thousands of them shared the false reports with others or called CBS, newspapers, or the police to ask if the broadcast was real.

The episode is famous for inciting a panic by convincing some members of the listening audience that a Martian invasion was taking place, though the scale of panic is disputed, as the program had relatively few listeners.

Orson Welles prepared to direct 10 actors and a 27-piece orchestra for the Columbia Broadcasting System’s weekly “Mercury Theatre on the Air” program.

Millions of Americans back then listened to CBS but it was announced that welles and his cast members were presenting  an original dramatization of the 1898 H.G. Wells science-fiction novel “The War of the Worlds.” Instead, most of the country was tuned in to NBC’s popular “Chase and Sanborn Hour,” which featured ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy, Charlie McCarthy. 

For the rest of the hour, terror crackled over the airwaves. Breathless reporters detailed an extra-terrestrial army of squid-like figures that killed thousands of earthlings with heat rays and black clouds of poison gas as they steamrolled into New York City. Welles and the rest of the cast impersonated astronomers, state militia officials and even the Secretary of the Interior, who cannily sounded like President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

A remake of the radio broadcast based on The War of the Worlds (1938) brought pandemonium to Quito, Ecuador, in 1949, as thousands of people attempted to escape impending Martian gas raids. A mob set fire to the radio station’s building, killing fifteen inside.

History context

People back then were vulnerable to fake news because they lacked other news sources, They were limited back then compared to now.

 By the end of the broadcast, CBS’s switchboard was ablaze, phone lines to police stations were jammed, people around the country were panicking, and people in Newark, N.J. wrapped their faces in wet towels and drove like hell out of town

 Researchers estimated, conservatively, that about 6 million people (a small audience then) heard the show, and about a million or so were genuinely frightened.

 Those who tuned in late and did not hear the opening disclaimer that this was a play were especially prone to being scared. In the first three weeks after the broadcast, newspapers around the country ran more than 12,500 stories about its impact.

39:30 it stops and fades off until

 It was still the Great Depression, with the unemployment rate hovering around 19 percent. In places like Flint, Mich., nearly half of the city’s families were on public relief

 Americans were experiencing this seemingly relentless economic uncertainty, another world war seemed imminent. Just one month before the broadcast, Hitler, having already annexed Austria, demanded that Germany be allowed to annex a portion of Czechoslovakia.

 Those who failed to ​“fact check” in some manner were more likely to panic, as were those with the least education and those who were highly suggestible

 The researchers also found that religion was an important factor in people falling for the broadcast; those who had strong, Bible-based beliefs thought this was the apocalypse, an act of God.

The New York Times reported “a wave of mass hysteria seized thousands of radio listeners” with some adults requiring “medical treatment for shock and hysteria”. Apparently, “thousands of persons” phoned different agencies “seeking advice on protective measures against the raids”

Theory’s

The cultivation theory: This theory can explain some of the hysteria that was caused. Gerbner’s research showed that heavy users of television, radio and newspapers have become more used to its messages.

First, “The War of the Worlds” was aired by Columbia Broadcasting Systems (CBS) – one of only two national broadcasters who were trusted by millions of listeners every day to deliver reliable and impartial news.

 It is also important to note that CBS frequently interrupted scheduled programmes to inform their listeners of the latest updates from Europe.

 In the weeks prior to “The War of the Worlds” episode, the network reported on Hitler’s continued occupation Czechoslovakia and the inevitability of another global conflict.

Media institutions

• War of the Worlds was broadcast by Columbia Broadcasting Company – an institution still in existence (in a different form) today.
• Radio broadcasting was seen as direct competition to newspapers which had previously been the only way of receiving news.
• The broadcast is typical of the way institutions are always looking for new styles in order to attract 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 provides an excellent example to consider the effect of individual producers on media industries (known as ‘auteur theory’) as this is the work of Orson Welles.

Media audiences

• What techniques (i.e Media Language) does the broadcast use to convince the audience that what they’re hearing is really happening?
• Consider the way that external factors – global political context, gender, religion, education etc. – are likely to also affect audience response
• The ways in which audiences interpret the same media product differently – at the time of broadcast and now (Reception theory including Hall)
• Cultivation theory including Gerbner

-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.

War of the worlds (1938) was a widespread outbreak in media. The audience were vulnerable as they weren’t aware as there were no resources available for them to realise it wasn’t true hence the lack of education they had. They only had the source they were given and it was down to them whether they wanted to believe it or not. Linked theories are the hypodermic needle theory and cultivation theory.