Adam Ruins Everything - War of the Worlds

[cartergold]

Just found out from a friend of mine that the War of the Worlds broadcast was featured on Adam Ruins Everything last night. I'll be checking out the full segment myself soon enough, but I did find a promo clip from the truTV YouTube page.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avJ_DfAQtMY

Should prove to be entertaining, even if it is relatively well-known by us folk.

[Wich2]

(I wonder if he knows of LIFE WITH ADAM...?)

[Le Chiffre]

Welles even admitted that the panic was exaggerated when he appeared with HG Welles on a radio show two years later, but I don't buy the idea that there was almost no panic at all. I don't think we'll ever know how many people panicked because many that did were probably too embarrassed to admit it afterward.

[Wich2]

Chief, as often in life, the Truth is not as sexy...

But when it comes to the legendary "Panic Broadcast," there really WAS almost no real "there" there:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/hist ... t_did.html

And the debunking of the myth started almost immediately after the myth:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/radio/what-t ... as-a-myth/

The "Liberty Valance" effect applies here.

-Craig

[cartergold]

I posted a reply earlier, but it must have disappeared.

What I initially replied with was that I do enjoy Adam, even if his segments can get too hyperbolic at times.

I have a session in one of my first year composition courses about the WotW broadcast. At the risk of over-simplifying the topic, I talk about how the performance was able to generate the responses that it did. One of the first things I always point out is that the panic has taken on far more epic proportions over time and we have to bring some truth to the legend, so to speak.

Even if Adam doesn't get a few things right (or indeed "ruins" it), I'm glad that there is someone bringing attention to it. When I give the same presentation as a community-wide event, attendees seem to think the panic around the broadcast was something out of The Purge.

[Wich2]

When I spoke about it in person with Bill Herz, he essentially agreed with what Houseman had said:

The genesis of most of the hoopla was the Newspapers seeing this as a great opportunity, "to piss on Radio."

-Craig

[Le Chiffre]

Chief, as often in life, the Truth is not as sexy...

The truth, Craig? Can any of us really know the truth 80 years after the fact?

Here's an angry letter to the FCC written by the city manager of Trenton, NJ, a day after the broadcast:
http://www.wellesnet.com/national-archi ... broadcast/

[RayKelly]

I agree it was played up by newspapers who felt threatened by radio, but I do believe *some* people were fooled that there was an attack.

I was fortunate to chat a few years ago with the legendary radio journalist Norman Corwin. He worked at CBS in NYC in October 1938. He was rehearsing in another studio and learned of the fuss in the late evening. "(The) next morning I called a friend of a mine who had worked in master control the night before, and asked him what time the last call came in. He answered after 1 in the morning."

I work at a daily newspaper in Massachusetts. I can accept an erroneous wire report going nationwide, but my newspaper and others had local anecdotes of people who were fooled.

And if we don;t trust newspaper reporters, can't we trust these switchboard operators:

[Wich2]

Guys, I never said "none"!

But much, much less than the legend we grew up with would have had us think; and that which did happen, of much smaller scope than the screaming reports would have had us believe.

Mass panic on the roads and streets? Suicides? Nope.

Beyond Grover's Mill, mainly some phone calls.

Best,
-Craig

P.S. - Let's keep in mind a logical point: if there had been real damage, there would have been the legal repercussions that CBS and Welles feared for a short while...

[Le Chiffre]

Beyond Grover's Mill, mainly some phone calls.

According to the letter, at least two thousand in one city in the space of two hours, including people from all over the country, worried about their loved ones in the region. I guess it depends on how you want to define "panic". I've never heard anything about suicides or mass panic on the roads, but it did go beyond phone calls, according to the

New York Times:

[Wich2]

I don't mean to be a wet blanket. And I am an amateur student of history, whose goal is the real truth.

But, NYT or not, that kind of immediate stuff always needs to be kept in context. It's Raw Reporting, not nailed down facts. Even up to today, details of disaster stories very often get downgraded as time passes. As the links I gave above, and other research, shows, very, very little of this morning after-type stuff was actually able to be documented later.

And again, I'd point to the lack of legal followup to anything. If no tangible charges could be proven, even of the "incitement/public nuisance" type, then that speaks a lot to the depth of the "panic."

Again: I'm not saying that nothing happened. But, more balance here:

https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015 ... the-worlds

"The story of John and Estelle Paultz, and a handful of other people who fled their homes or thought of doing so, prove that the War of the Worlds panic had a definite basis in fact, though such scenes were very, very rare. Even among people frightened by the program, most stayed close to their radios, listening intently for up to half an hour before they figured out it was science fiction"

-Craig

[Terry]

The only empirical evidence from the time of the event is the letter(s) complaining about emergency phone lines being jammed by calls from people upset about an invasion. I've never verified this evidence, though I always assumed there certainly was some bad excitement caused by Welles soaping the nation's windows. The scale and intensity of the 'panic' is something we'll never know. As for the press reaction, I always liked Welles' explanation that the newspapers were attacking radio for stealing their advertising revenue. Apparently fake news has been around for a long time.

H.G. Wells posited to Orson that the 'panic' could have been Americans pretending to be afraid since it was Halloween. I think it's incorrect to discount that anything happened, as some online authors have done in recent years, and incorrect also to completely throw out Hadley Cantril's conclusions since someone didn't like the sampling method he used 80 years ago.

To paraphrase Carl Phillips, "something happened."

[Le Chiffre]

H.G. Wells posited to Orson that the 'panic' could have been Americans pretending to be afraid since it was Halloween.

Yes, that seems to be the Wells/Welles position: that the so-called "panic" was in fact a fake panic that consisted mainly of practical jokes. That's a possibility that's never really been explored, if it even could be.

Thanks for linking that fine article by Brad Schwartz, Craig; and his book is a very fine piece of research. But he does contradict your "newspapers pissing on radio theory":

The brief, isolated outbreaks of fear and confusion captured in the letters hardly add up to the “wave of mass hysteria” that The New York Times and other papers conveyed. But there is no hard evidence that the press deliberately played up the panic in order to cast aspersions on news broadcasting. In fact, papers and radio were getting along better than ever in the fall of 1938, having finally realized that the public saw them as complimentary news sources, not competitors. Instead, it seems more likely that many dailies used War of the Worlds simply as an opportunity to increase circulation with eye-catching headlines. As Paul W. White, the managing director of CBS News, observed in his 1947 book News on the Air, “Not in every case, but in too many cases, news stories are written to justify headlines which will make people want to buy newspapers.” And nothing sells papers like massive headlines about Martians and panic.

So, three years before Kane, Welles was well aquainted with the idea of "Yellow Journalism" ("If the headline is big enough, it makes the news big enough"). But as Hadji says, SOMETHING had to have happened first.

[Wich2]

>I always assumed there certainly was some bad excitement caused by Welles soaping the nation's windows<

Hadji, as I've said all along, "some" is a given. (But "THE NIGHT THAT PANICKED AMERICA"? No.)

>he does contradict your "newspapers pissing on radio theory":<

Chief, that's not my explanation - it's Houseman's! (You can even hear him say it in a recorded interview.)

>To paraphrase Carl Phillips, "something happened."<

And to paraphrase Superman to Lois, in the first Donner film. "But that was in a story..."

Best,
-Craig

[Terry]

Oh, then I agree 100%. Growing up in the 70s and 80s it was always 'the night that panicked America.' I'm glad that's being walked back these days (though I bristle at walking it back too far.)