What Orson Welles’s ‘War of the Worlds’ broadcast tells us, 88 years later
The 1938 broadcast worked because it borrowed the look and sound of breaking news. Listeners who tuned in late missed the opening disclaimer and heard what sounded like urgent bulletins about a Martian invasion. Some panicked, and the episode became a cautionary tale about media power that still gets cited today.
Eighty-eight years on, we're still sorting through what it means. The panic may have been overstated by newspapers eager to discredit radio, and historians have debated how many people actually believed the invasion was real. But the core lesson holds: when something sounds like news, we tend to treat it as news.
The dynamic feels familiar now. Misinformation moves through social media wearing the trappings of journalism, and the same trust in familiar formats is at work. The difference is scale and speed, not the underlying vulnerability. I'd want to know more about how much of the original panic was real versus manufactured by the press, because that shapes what lesson we should actually take from it.