Fake news got its start 80 years ago with ‘War of the Worlds’
This October 30 will mark the 80th anniversary of Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds” broadcast. We all know the story: He got on the radio, announced that his show (“The Mercury Theatre on Air”) would be putting on a production of H.G. Wells’ famous novel, and then the broadcast of the “play” began, which consisted of live-sounding news reports of a Martian invasion in Grover’s Mill (part of West Windsor).
Then every single person in America freaked out and thought what they were listening to was real and mass hysteria ensued, dogs and cats sleeping together, etc.
Except uh … fake news.
At least according to A. Brad Schwartz, a doctoral student in the Princeton University Department of History and author of “Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles’s ‘War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News.” (Before we go any further, know this book was published in 2015, well before “fake news” became a thing. “It’s been a bit of a blessing and a curse,” Schwartz notes. Anyway …)
Anyway, Schwartz — who will be speaking at the Princeton Public Library on Thursday, October 18 at 7 p.m. — uncovered some uncomfortable truths about what we think we know about the aftermath of the broadcast, namely the “mass hysteria” part of the equation was simply not true.
As a junior at the University of Michigan, Schwartz — a fan of old time radio plays, someone who did a project on “War of the Worlds” in high school — was told by a librarian the university had recently obtained a treasure trove of Welles’ letters, including hundreds written in the immediate aftermath of the broadcast. Schwartz immediately set out to read them. He was thinking “senior thesis.” He was excited. He’d be the first person in 70 years to really dig through them.
And ...
“I was totally caught off guard,” Schwartz told me. “Knowing story of the panic, of people grabbing shotguns, fleeing their homes, I was anticipating the letters would be full of panic, full of anger. But as I started going through them, I was immediately surprised the vast majority were supportive of Welles, were not frightened by the broadcast, but were in fact frightened by response to it, namely the idea of government censorship.”
That’s right. The government got scared of this new-fangled radio nonsense and wanted to censor fictitious broadcasting. The FCC was in its infancy, and some legislators wanted to ban all forms of non-”real” broadcasts.
In the end, the arts won out and radio did a bit of self-policing to avoid any “War of the Worlds”-like confusion in later years.
Not to say the whole story of people losing their minds is false; indeed, an untold number of Americans thought something terrible was happening. But not necessarily an invasion from Mars, Schwartz said. Many thought the invaders came from somewhere even more scary at the time: Nazi Germany.
“I think it’s important to put the hysteria caused by broadcast in context, need to understand why some people believed,” Schwartz said. “One, because of circumstances, and two because it resonated with fears they already had. Most of the people who were frightened thought it was a Nazi invasion, not Martian invasion. This is right before World War II, there was a major diplomatic crisis right before this. And people are hearing a news report about invaders attacking America. That’s where your mind goes.”
Even so, virtually all of the “panic” ensued not from original listeners of the broadcast, but the listeners who tuned in late after being told what was on the radio. You know, Johnny tells Mary who tells Joey and next thing you know, there’s no one in your social circle to dispel the “fake news.”
“The real power of fake news is when it’s shared, not consumed directly,” Schwartz notes. “And that is still with us today, and even more significant in the age of social media.”
There’s a lot more to this story — I mean, the dude is a Princeton doctoral student who wrote a book about it — and so I’ll stop here. Check him out at the Princeton township library next week. It’s part of a handful of events the library will be putting on in honor of the 80th anniversary of the broadcast.
In the meantime, please enjoy the music of Ramón Raquello and his orchestra ....