"War of the Worlds" did not cause a panic!!

[JoeB131]

A couple interesting articles on this subject here.

The reason I'm posting this is because on the "News Radio Station", they repeated the lazy claim that millions of people heard the broadcast and thought it was real.


Why ?War of the Worlds? show didn?t panic America | Media Myth Alert

Orson Welles? War of the Worlds panic myth: The infamous radio broadcast did not cause a nationwide hysteria.

There’s only one problem: The supposed panic was so tiny as to be practically immeasurable on the night of the broadcast. Despite repeated assertions to the contrary in the PBS and NPR programs, almost nobody was fooled by Welles’ broadcast.








How did the story of panicked listeners begin? Blame America’s newspapers. Radio had siphoned off advertising revenue from print during the Depression, badly damaging the newspaper industry. So the papers seized the opportunity presented by Welles’ program to discredit radio as a source of news. The newspaper industry sensationalized the panic to prove to advertisers, and regulators, that radio management was irresponsible and not to be trusted. In an editorial titled “Terror by Radio,” the New York Times reproached “radio officials” for approving the interweaving of “blood-curdling fiction” with news flashes “offered in exactly the manner that real news would have been given.” Warned Editor and Publisher, the newspaper industry’s trade journal, “The nation as a whole continues to face the danger of incomplete, misunderstood news over a medium which has yet to prove ... that it is competent to perform the news job.”

 

[jwoodie]

Good show on PBS last night.

 

[Wry Catcher]

The American Experience is one of the best programs on TV. Debate on this forum would be on such a higher jlevel if only more of us watched PBS.

 

[Trajan]

The American Experience is one of the best programs on TV. Debate on this forum would be on such a higher jlevel if only more of us watched PBS.

is that the PBS that gave the Wall st. journal Editorial report a ton of shit and basically made it impossible for them to program 1 half hour show a week?

 

[JoeB131]

The American Experience is one of the best programs on TV. Debate on this forum would be on such a higher jlevel if only more of us watched PBS.

Usually it is. In this case, though, they repeated teh same lazy myth.

And on my "News Radio" station this morning, they did the same thing.