The Broadcast That Panicked Newspapers More Than Listeners - An RC Inspired by IIM Indore

On the evening of 30 October 1938, a radio adaptation of H. G. Wells's novel The War of the Worlds was broadcast across the United States by the Columbia Broadcasting System, with a young Orson Welles as its director and star. By the next morning, newspapers were reporting that thousands of listeners had fled their homes, jammed telephone exchanges and prepared for death by Martian gas. The episode soon became the standard proof that mass media can drive a whole nation into panic.

The authority behind that story was a study by Hadley Cantril, a Princeton psychologist, published in 1940 as The Invasion from Mars. Cantril estimated that about six million people had heard the broadcast and that well over a million of them had taken it for real news. His explanation was psychological. Listeners were anxious after a decade of economic collapse and with war gathering in Europe, and they trusted the radio as a voice of authority, so a convincing imitation of a news bulletin found them unprepared. The study became a cornerstone of early communication research and was long read as a model of careful method.

The trouble is that the evidence for the panic seems far thinner than the legend. Scholars who have revisited the record, among them Jefferson Pooley and Michael Socolow, have argued that the audience was small. A telephone survey reported at the time found that only a small fraction of radio households were tuned to the programme, while a rival show on another network drew far more listeners. Few documented cases of real flight or injury have been found. Cantril's own interviews covered only a modest number of people, and he relied partly on a survey taken weeks afterward, when newspaper coverage had already shaped what people remembered.

If so, the panic was largely written by the newspapers, and the broadcast made Welles, then twenty three, nationally famous. The press was then in a bitter contest with radio for advertising money in the Depression, and a story that showed the new medium as reckless was welcome. Editors had a motive to find hysteria, and a headline about a frightened nation needed only a handful of anecdotes.

Editors had a motive to find hysteria, and a headline about a frightened nation needed only a handful of anecdotes.

The revision has a fair reply. Some listeners were plainly alarmed, and letters to Welles and to the Federal Communications Commission survive. A fright need not be a stampede, and Cantril may have been right that some believed even if he overstated how many. Yet this concession raises a harder question. If a small number of frightened people could be turned into a national panic by repetition in print, the story shows the power of the press more than the power of radio.

The irony is difficult to settle. A tale about the gullibility of the public was itself accepted by the public, by scholars and by textbooks for decades, and those who repeated it were rarely the people it described. Later fears about comic books, television and the internet have borrowed the same template of a helpless audience. Whether audiences are as credulous as the legend says, or whether the claim of their credulity is the most successful broadcast of the age, depends on a measure of belief that nobody in 1938 thought to take and that nobody can now recover.