Media Powerful Effects: History Foretold

H.G Wells' The War of the Lords radio broadcast in 1938 was the first story I heard as a Media student more than a decade ago. It depicted the enormous effects of media on human perception, on the society. Today, it stays etched to my memory. The impact that this radio drama had on the people was just unthinkable.

Of the six million listeners who tuned in to the radio, one million actually believed that Martians were invading the Earth, just because they missed the play's introduction that explained the inclusion of make-believe news flashes!

Panic-stricken people who frantically escaping death from the Martians. Hundreds of people in New York fled their homes. Bus terminals were crowded. In Rhode Island, officials of the electric company reported receiving many calls urging them to turn off all the lights so that the city would be saft from the invaders. A man from Pittsburgh came home in the middle of the broadcast and found his wife in the bathroom with a bottle of poison in her hands and screaming, "I'd rather die this way than that." Many people in Birmingham, Alabama gathered in churches and prayed. In Boston, one woman said she could see the smoke and fire fromt eh Martian invasion. A man even climbed atop a Manhattan building with binoculars and described seeing "the flames of battle." Concrete, a town in Washington experienced a power failure at the very moment the Martians were supposed to have been disrupting the nation's power sources. This created mass hysteria as it appeared to confirm the reality of the broadcast.

The widespread dramatic effects were attributed to many reasons. The broadcast depicted Martians landing at the Wilmuth farm in New Jersey and made references to real places, buildings, highways, and streets. There were prestigious speakers and convincing sound effects. The play was directed and narrated by George Orson Wells, a 23-year-old theatrical prodigy, and accompanied by a group of actors and musicians in a New York City studio of the Columbia Broadcasting System's Mercury Theater.

As we remember the lessons of the past, we ponder what new media panic awaits us.