https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/ ... -orso.html
Schwartz: What the War of the Worlds story demonstrates is the press’ ability to create and shape narratives that then impact real life. They set the tone and the terms of the discussion, and everything else plays out along those lines. Because of the way the coverage of the election was structured, there was so much stuff going on the Trump side that you couldn’t necessarily grab ahold of one thing. Maybe it should have been Russia, maybe it should have been his temperament, but there was just so much going on. If you were just dipping into the press coverage and not following it intently, there was no one issue that jumped out at you. But on the Clinton side, the narrative was: “emails, we don’t know exactly what the emails are, but something in there is dangerous.” The narrative shifted to fit that perception. So that would be the much bigger fake news. Even bigger than the individual hoaxes that came out during the campaign. That would be the big fake news narrative, that the emails were a serious problem.
Paste: Sure, taking a non-story and turning it into an over-arching narrative.
Schwartz: Precisely, which is what happened in War of the Worlds. There were isolated instances of panic, but there wasn’t this mass wave of hysteria that the press, and later the Princeton study, described. But because that was the narrative that they created, that comes down to us through the popular culture, through the academic literature. And still to this day, it influences how we understand the power of the media. And so this past election has been a perfect demonstration of how the legitimate news media can make something out of nothing...the Right in America has for decades now built-up gradually, but inexorably, their own media ecosystem, their own kind of echo chamber, where if you are in that, you’re getting a much different view of the state of the country, than if you’re watching CNN or MSNBC regularly. The vision of America that Trump gave in his inaugural address is the vision of America that you get if you’re in that conservative media bubble. And that may be a reason why the Trump supporters were more susceptible to these kinds of fake news.