‘Ladies and Gentlemen we interrupt our program … ’

Abstract

In October 1938, the lives of Americans across the country were interrupted by an emergency news broadcast informing them that Martians had invaded New Jersey. The following day, stories about the panic occasioned by Orson Welles' radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds covered the front pages of newspapers in the United States and abroad. The panic about the programme led to a broader panic about the power of radio to disseminate misinformation and manipulate people. For journalists, politicians and academics, the radio play raised questions that continue to resonate today: How do we know what to believe? How can we maintain a critical ability to judge the news, particularly in times of social and political upheaval? And finally, how can people harness the power of new media to foster critical thinking in the face of coordinated misinformation campaigns?

Notes

1 Edward D. Miller traces the affinity of radio with emergency interruptions to the very beginnings of the medium, when point-to-point radio was used in particular to locate distress signals of sinking ships (2003: 113).

2 Here, I use the term ‘fake news’ anachronistically to highlight contemporary parallels. The similar term that National Socialists used to discredit unfavourable press coverage was ‘Lügenpresse’ (press of lies) (Snyder 2019).

3 In one of very few convergences between Brecht’s politics and American foreign policy, in 2001 the United States airdropped hundreds of wind-up radios preset to only pick up the frequency of US military broadcasting in their attempt to win ‘the hearts and minds’ of Afghans (Duffy 2001).

4 The full recording of the War of the Worlds broadcast can be found at: https://bit.ly/3f8R9Jy