The Martian Effect. the War of the Worlds Broadcast

To most individuals living in the United States on October 30, 1938, this Sunday evening seemed like any other Sunday evening. Around 7:00 pm, millions of families across the country were finishing dinner and waiting to tune into their favorite radio show. Approximately 34.7 percent of the nation’s listenership would be tuning into NBC’s the Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy Show at 8:00 pm. However, on this particular Sunday evening, another radio broadcast was about to make history. As usual many listeners of the Bergen and McCarthy show decided to “twiddle” their dials instead of listening to coffee advertisements. At 8:12 pm those listeners who turned the dial on the Chase&Sandborn coffee ads found themselves, stunned, listening to what seemed like a live report of an alien invasion occurring in Grover’s Mill, New Jersey. The ‘live report’ was actually part of the Mercury Theatre on the Air’s fictional Halloween broadcast, the War of the Worlds. Howard Koch’s radio adaption of H.G Wells’s 1898 novel resulted in chaos. People all over the country began fleeing cities; calling loved ones, and flooding churches and police stations. The reaction forced audiences and networks alike to realize that “when the circumstances are right the media can create panic and other effects that are unpredictable, disruptive, and wide-ranging.” In my essay I will discuss the three major reasons why the radio dramatization War of the Worlds broadcast resulted in a nationwide panic: first the fear of foreign invasion was a realistic concern in 1938; secondly the show’s manipulation of sound blurred the line between fiction and reality in a way that had never been done before; lastly newspapers across the country printed stories that exaggerated the hysteria in an attempt to tarnish radio’s reputation as a serious and reliable media outlet. The War of the Worlds aired during a period of political turmoil and paranoia in America. Fears of foreign invasion and anxieties toward