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A book at the library about "Orson Welles's War of the Worlds and the Rise of Fake News" caught my attention, and I decided to sign out "Broadcast Hysteria". While I might think of the radio program as a "secondary" development from H.G. Wells's original novel, I've heard the stories about the later work too, including watching a television documentary about it just a few years ago. It turned out the book's author A. Brad Schwartz had worked on that documentary as well, turning up letters people had written to Welles and the FCC right after the radio program to get a new perspective on the old tales of "mass panic" and the more recent suggestions those tales were in fact "tall."
Drawing on the contemporary records, the book squarely addresses the newspaper reports of panic (and the suggestions the whole problem had been people "changing stations"), but humanizes the people who were frightened from the object lessons they might have been made. In tracking beyond that to the later career of Orson Welles (also touching on in passing the conventional wisdom that the only thing that got in the way of Citizen Kane was the unwarranted hostility of William Randolph Hearst) and then the contemporary media landscape, I suppose the book just might invite a few loaded comments from some about it "overstepping itself." It got me thinking, though, and one thing it brought to mind was something it didn't touch on itself.
In describing the broadcast itself and the reactions recorded, the book suggested the people who panicked the most (if to "flee" only in rare cases) weren't thinking so much of "the Martians" as turning half-heard dialogue into more realistic contemporary threats. That had me thinking of how some of the first people to say the US Air Force was "covering up flying saucers," just as if to not believe "definitive proof" unidentified flying objects are alien spacecraft is hidden somewhere would be to face the possibility it doesn't exist, were thinking back to the newspaper reports of the the broadcast and concluding aliens were something people would uniquely "panic" about. Things shifted and twisted from there until the seemingly interesting idea of "life out there" was all but lost under accusations of the wickedness of authority, but I did get to wondering if they just might have been different had a subtler picture been known.
Drawing on the contemporary records, the book squarely addresses the newspaper reports of panic (and the suggestions the whole problem had been people "changing stations"), but humanizes the people who were frightened from the object lessons they might have been made. In tracking beyond that to the later career of Orson Welles (also touching on in passing the conventional wisdom that the only thing that got in the way of Citizen Kane was the unwarranted hostility of William Randolph Hearst) and then the contemporary media landscape, I suppose the book just might invite a few loaded comments from some about it "overstepping itself." It got me thinking, though, and one thing it brought to mind was something it didn't touch on itself.
In describing the broadcast itself and the reactions recorded, the book suggested the people who panicked the most (if to "flee" only in rare cases) weren't thinking so much of "the Martians" as turning half-heard dialogue into more realistic contemporary threats. That had me thinking of how some of the first people to say the US Air Force was "covering up flying saucers," just as if to not believe "definitive proof" unidentified flying objects are alien spacecraft is hidden somewhere would be to face the possibility it doesn't exist, were thinking back to the newspaper reports of the the broadcast and concluding aliens were something people would uniquely "panic" about. Things shifted and twisted from there until the seemingly interesting idea of "life out there" was all but lost under accusations of the wickedness of authority, but I did get to wondering if they just might have been different had a subtler picture been known.