Case Study 2.1: The War of the Worlds Broadcast (1938) — Myth vs. Reality

Chapter 2: The History of Misinformation — From Rumor to the Internet Age

Overview

On October 30, 1938, Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre on the Air broadcast an adaptation of H.G. Wells' 1898 novel The War of the Worlds on CBS radio. The broadcast presented the story of a Martian invasion as if it were a real news bulletin, complete with simulated news announcements, emergency reports, and dramatic eyewitness accounts. Within hours, news reports spread that the broadcast had caused mass panic across the United States — listeners had fled their homes, jammed highways trying to escape, flooded police stations with calls, and some had reportedly attempted suicide.

There is one problem with this story: it is substantially false.

The War of the Worlds broadcast is, paradoxically, one of the most illuminating case studies in the history of misinformation precisely because the most famous version of what happened — mass panic, national hysteria, widespread confusion between fiction and reality — is itself largely a myth, fabricated primarily by competing newspaper industry interests. The real story reveals something both more nuanced and more revealing about media psychology, the economic incentives of news organizations, and the conditions under which media scares become culturally entrenched.

Background: Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre

Orson Welles was twenty-three years old at the time of the broadcast, already a celebrated figure in American theater. The Mercury Theatre on the Air was his radio drama company, which broadcast weekly adaptations of literary works on CBS. The program did not command enormous ratings; on the night of October 30, it competed directly against the enormously popular Chase and Sanborn Hour on NBC, which featured Edgar Bergen and his dummy Charlie McCarthy.

The adaptation of Wells' War of the Worlds was written by Howard Koch. It opened with a brief musical program that was interrupted by successive "news bulletins" reporting strange explosions on Mars, then a meteor strike in New Jersey, then the emergence of Martian machines. The simulated journalism was remarkably well-crafted — featuring fake reporters, fake experts from "Princeton University" and "the National History Museum," and convincing impersonations of news report formats. The show ran without commercial breaks for the first forty minutes, and regular announcements that it was a fictional radio drama occurred only at the program's beginning, after the simulated "music program" segment, and at the end.

What Actually Happened: The Evidence

The Ratings Context

The most fundamental fact about the War of the Worlds broadcast, regularly omitted from popular accounts, is how few people heard it. CBS's own surveys estimated that approximately 6 million people listened to the broadcast. Of those, audience research at the time found that roughly 1.2 million (20%) tuned in late — missing the opening announcement that this was a fictional drama — and of those, some portion were temporarily uncertain about what they were hearing.

For comparison, the competing NBC program that night had approximately 30 million listeners. Most Americans were listening to something else.

Princeton's Study: Cantril (1940)

The most rigorous early study of the broadcast was conducted by social psychologist Hadley Cantril at Princeton University. His book The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic (1940) is the primary academic source for claims of widespread panic. Cantril found genuine evidence of anxiety and confusion among a subset of listeners, but his methodology was criticized: he relied heavily on interviews with people who self-reported distress, which likely overrepresented those who had been most affected.

More recent analysis of Cantril's raw data and contemporary sources by scholars including Michael Socolow and Jefferson Pooley has found that genuine panic was highly localized and far less widespread than Cantril's framing suggested. Police logs, hospital records, and contemporaneous accounts from the nights of the broadcast do not support the image of nationwide hysteria.

The Newspaper Angle

Here is the crucial piece of historical context for the panic myth: American newspapers in 1938 faced an existential competitive threat from radio. Radio was eating into newspaper advertising revenue, drawing audiences away from print, and providing news faster than morning papers could. Newspaper publishers were deeply hostile to radio as a medium.

When the War of the Worlds broadcast provided an opportunity to portray radio as irresponsible and dangerous, newspaper editors seized it. The coverage the morning after was enormous, dramatically disproportionate to the actual documented impact. Headlines screamed about "Radio War Scare" and "Radio Listeners in Panic." Stories described highways jammed with fleeing families, churches packed with the terrified, and hospitals overwhelmed with hysterical listeners.

Most of these accounts were not based on verified reporting. Journalists interviewed people who said they had been frightened. They found examples of anxiety from a broadcast to an audience of millions, which is not surprising — some people are anxious. But the framing, the scale implied, and the picture of nationwide hysteria was substantially manufactured by a newspaper industry with financial incentives to discredit radio.

Media historian Michael Socolow, who conducted the most thorough recent examination of the historical record, concluded in a 2008 article in Slate: "The supposed panic was so tiny as to be practically nonexistent." Jefferson Pooley and Michael Socolow's 2013 Slate article, published on the broadcast's 75th anniversary, is titled "The Myth of the War of the Worlds Panic."

What the Legend Reveals

About Media Competition

The War of the Worlds panic myth illustrates how information about media can be shaped by media actors' self-interest. Newspapers did not simply report events passionately; they actively constructed a story that served their competitive interests. This is not unique to 1938 — it is a recurring pattern in how established media institutions respond to disruptive new media competitors. The internet's early period generated much legitimate concern about online misinformation, but also a great deal of traditional media coverage that (perhaps unconsciously) emphasized the dangers of the new competitor.

About Confirmation Bias in History

The panic story "felt" right to many people at the time and since, for several reasons: - It confirmed existing anxieties about the power of mass media over a democratized, mass audience - It fit narratives about the "gullible public" that intellectual elites have always found appealing - It provided a dramatic, emotionally satisfying story that was easy to tell and retell - Subsequent retellings reinforced it, making it feel more certain through the illusory truth effect

The myth persisted for decades in textbooks, media studies courses, and popular culture precisely because it was a good story — simple, dramatic, morally instructive. Its utility as a cautionary tale made people less critical about verifying its factual basis.

About the Psychology of Influence

Even accepting the revisionist account — that documented panic was quite limited — the broadcast does tell us something genuinely interesting about media and psychology. Cantril's research, despite its methodological problems, identified a real phenomenon: under conditions of pre-existing anxiety (1938 was a period of enormous tension in Europe, with the Munich Crisis occurring just weeks earlier), some listeners did experience genuine distress from realistic-seeming radio drama.

What made the broadcast effective for those who were affected was not that it was convincingly realistic in every detail — Martian cylinders landing in New Jersey would have seemed impossible to most listeners — but that it exploited the authority of the news bulletin format. The simulated reporter's voice, the interruption of programming, the calm expert commentary followed by escalating distress — these borrowed the epistemic authority that listeners attached to news broadcasts. It was not belief in Martians per se but trust in the news format that created the temporary confusion.

This is an important lesson: media formats carry epistemic authority independent of their content. The news bulletin format says "this is real" — and audiences extend that presumption of reality to content within that format, even when logic should override it.

The International Dimension: Real Panics, Different Contexts

While the 1938 American "panic" was largely mythologized, genuine panics did occur when the War of the Worlds scenario was recreated in different cultural contexts:

Quito, Ecuador (1949): A Spanish-language adaptation of War of the Worlds broadcast on Radio Quito did cause genuine panic. When listeners discovered they had been fooled, they were enraged — and a mob stormed and burned the radio station, killing several people. The 1949 Quito panic was the genuine mass-reaction version of what the American legend falsely described.

Buffalo, New York (1968): A local radio station re-created the 1938 broadcast format for Halloween. Despite multiple disclaimers, it generated some local anxiety — suggesting the format's power endures.

Portugal (1988): A 50th anniversary adaptation on a Portuguese station caused widespread alarm in several regions before disclaimers were aired.

The pattern across these cases suggests that the power of realistic-seeming emergency broadcasting to create confusion is real — but highly dependent on contextual factors including existing anxiety levels, trust in media institutions, media literacy, and the quality of the adaptation.

Lessons for Media Literacy

Lesson 1: Stories About Media Often Serve Media Interests

The War of the Worlds panic story was produced and amplified by newspapers with a competitive interest in discrediting radio. This teaches an important meta-lesson: be skeptical of dramatic narratives about media's dangerous power that are themselves produced by competing media. The contemporary version of this lesson applies to how traditional media covers social media's dangers — the coverage may be accurate and important, but it is also produced by a competitor with incentives to emphasize social media's flaws.

Lesson 2: Absence of Verification Can Preserve False Narratives Indefinitely

The panic myth persisted for seventy-five years in textbooks and popular culture because no one rigorously examined the primary sources — police logs, hospital records, contemporaneous news coverage beyond the first day's headlines — until relatively recently. This illustrates why historical claims, like any empirical claims, require primary source verification rather than reliance on secondary accounts that may themselves have been shaped by the interests of the original reporters.

Lesson 3: Format Authority Is a Genuine Vulnerability

Even if the panic was smaller than claimed, the broadcast does illuminate a real vulnerability: media formats carry epistemic authority. The news bulletin format says "this is real," and audiences transfer the authority of the format to the content. This vulnerability remains relevant: deepfake videos exploit the authority of visual evidence; fake news websites exploit the visual format of legitimate news sites; fabricated screenshots exploit the format of text messages and social media posts. Format authority is a persistent vector for confusion regardless of content.

Lesson 4: The Myth Became More Influential Than the Reality

The cultural influence of the War of the Worlds panic story is enormous, despite its substantial falsity. It shaped media regulation policy, academic research agendas, public understanding of media influence, and countless subsequent discussions of media literacy. This is a historical example of the "continued influence effect": a false account can become the basis for consequential decisions even after the account has been substantially undermined.

Discussion Questions

1. The War of the Worlds panic myth was substantially created by newspapers with a financial interest in discrediting radio. Who are the contemporary equivalents — what media actors have incentives to create or amplify particular narratives about other media's dangers? How can we account for these interests without dismissing legitimate concerns about media?

2. Cantril's 1940 study has significant methodological problems that scholars have only recently documented thoroughly. What does this suggest about the relationship between academic research and the persistence of false media narratives? Should academic authorities be treated differently from journalistic sources when evaluating historical claims?

3. Genuine panics did occur when War of the Worlds was adapted in other cultural contexts (Quito 1949, Portugal 1988). What factors made those contexts different from 1938 USA? What does this suggest about the role of culture, existing anxiety levels, and media literacy in determining media effects?

4. The broadcast exploited the epistemic authority of the news bulletin format — listeners trusted the format and extended that trust to the content. What contemporary media formats carry similar epistemic authority, and how are they being exploited? (Consider: realistic-looking fake news websites, deepfake videos in documentary format, social media posts formatted to look like official announcements.)

5. The panic myth became culturally entrenched partly because it was a "good story" — simple, dramatic, morally instructive. This is essentially the same mechanism that makes misinformation sticky: it tends to be more narratively compelling than accurate complexity. What does this suggest about how we should design misinformation correction messages?

6. The Mercury Theatre's broadcast began with an explicit statement that it was a fictional drama. Many people missed this because they tuned in late. What responsibilities do media producers have to prevent their creative work from being misunderstood as factual? How does this question apply to contemporary satire, parody, and "based on true events" dramatizations?

Key Sources

Cantril, Hadley. The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940.

Koch, Howard. The Panic Broadcast: Portrait of an Event. Boston: Little, Brown, 1970.

Pooley, Jefferson, and Michael Socolow. "The Myth of the War of the Worlds Panic." Slate, October 28, 2013.

Socolow, Michael J. "'The Hyped Panic over 'War of the Worlds'." Slate, October 28, 2008.

Hand, Richard J. Terror on the Air!: Horror Radio in America, 1931–1952. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006.