war of the worlds
The article "The Invasion from Mars: Radio Panics America", author and source unknown, is a review of the Orsen Wells's, "War of the Worlds" phenomena, and the first mass communication study researching this event, Hadley Cantril's (1940)The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic. The event referenced above was a dramatic radio broadcast of a fictional alien invasion. The broadcast aired on October 30th, 1938, and created wide spread panic among many people who believed it to be a factual news account. The phenomenon has been traditionally used to support theories that believe mass communication has a powerful effect on its audience. Although the early communication research of this event is generally considered faulty, the event itself was believed to cause panic with at least a million people, and the research into it was the first of its kind. The article first provides us with some background as to the social environment of the audience during this first broadcast. Radio Broadcasting in 1938, although it had been around for over two decades, had only recently reached critical mass and acceptance among American Society. It had replaced the newspaper as the
I wouldn't argue that War of the Worlds was a brilliant broadcast, but I find it unlikely that any contemporary fictional mass communication could inspire such mass hysteria, no matter how brilliant. First of all the AIPO study took place 6 weeks after the fact and the interviewers personally sought out the interview subjects. Despite the fact that the story took place with an unbelievable time line, reporters moving twenty miles in a matter of minutes, and was interrupted four times to give disclaimers that it is fictional, it still inspired panic in over a million people. With the blatant research mistakes performed within the original study. The results of the study concluded there were four different responses within people who heard the broadcast: people who successfully checked the internal evidence of the broadcast, people who successfully checked external information with the internal broadcast information, people who unsuccessfully checked external information, and people that didn't critically check the information at all (those who just panicked). Science Fiction broadcasts were not very common, and radio broadcasting had just developed the technique of "on the spot reporting". Based on the surveys the researcher believed that over 6 million people heard the broadcast, and over a million in a half were panicked by it. The dramatization included an "emergency broadcast" by the secretary of the interior, interviews with "experts" in the military and universities, and "on the spot reporting". The third was by review of newspaper accounts and mail volume to CBS and the FCC. There was a huge discrepancy between the first and the second survey, the researcher thought this was because the second survey included smaller communities. Compound that with the naivete of the populace towards the belief that broadcasting was a "pure" medium, and we could see how such a panicked situation could occur. The first was through personal interviews of 135 people. It could also have been because after six weeks of the event being reported and criticized in the newspapers, subjects potentially had a lot of social desirability factors motivating their answers. The researchers felt that the people who panicked had little critical ability, and felt the cause was lack of education.
Common topics in this essay:
FCC Based,
Science Fiction,
Psychology Panic,
War Worlds,
American Society,
Radio Broadcasting,
Panics America,
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,
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checked external,
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external information,
spot reporting,
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panic people research,
people successfully,
october 30th 1938,
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