More news about "War of the Worlds"

                  Did newspapers hype the panic over The War of the Worlds?

                  No one has pointed fingers this week at The Inquirer, whose 1938 day-after coverage of Orson Welles' radio version ------ in which aliens attacked New Jersey ----- is a classic of deadline writing, anthologized in A Treasury of Great Reporting.

                  I posted about it this week, quoting liberally from George M. Mawhinney's lead story in the 6 a.m. edition of the Oct.31, 1938, paper. 

                  And on Tuesday, the Philadelphia Daily News, in classic knockdown fashion, wrote:

                 "There was not this mass panic," said American University professor W. Joseph Campbell, who wrote about the broadcast in "Getting It Wrong:  Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism."  "The fright that night was very limited to a few pockets of people who were concerned.  To most listners of that show, it was very clear it was entertainment."

                 Slate took a similar tack.  Professors Jefferson Pooley and Michael Socolow blame the coverage on competition ----- the old-guard papers taking a clear shot at upstart radio.

                 Radio had taken advertising revenue from print during the Depression, they wrote, damaging the newspaper industry.  So the papers saw the Welles broadcast as an opportunity to get even.

                 Indeed, the lead paragraph of The Inquirer's next-morning piece asserted that "terror struck at the hearts of hundreds of thousands of persons........"

                 Hundreds of thousands?   Or a few pockets?  Or something in between?

                 Here's another perspective.  As the historian Robert Brown wrote in 1998's Manipulating the Ether, "After the speech of the 'secretary,' Americans had every reason to believe that the end of the world was at hand."  That would be the secretary of the interior, portrayed by an actor.

                 Many Americans did panic, Brown wrote, partly because much of the audience had tuned in to Welles in mid-show.  He q2uotes a Time article from April 1940 that asserted that of the six million people who heard the broadcast, 1.7 million believed it to be true.  Many other polls, taken during the same period, showed similar sentiment, he said.

                 Brown wrote that Americans were wary of gas attacks and in particular wary of Germany, which a month before Welles' broadcast had annexed parts of Czechoslovakia under the Munich Agreement.  The news was relayed during the Munich crisis over radio in bulletins and on-the-scene reporting ---- just the style that Welles capitalized on in his broadcast.

                 A broadcast that Brown says was genius.

                 "A significant part of the listening audience did consider the broadcast to be authenic and ;acted accordingly,he said.

                Here's one more indicator ---- the next-day story that appeared in the Nov. 1, 1938, Inquirer :

                It was generally agreed that nothing has shaken Philadelphia in like degree since the extraordinary "premature" Armistice lacking but a few days of 20 years ago........