Christian Science Monitor Blog | The Index Archive July, 2005
"... while the film version of the century-old tale of alien invaders will no doubt dazzle, the real surprise for some might be the effects that the 1938 Halloween radio adaptation of the H.G. Wells book had on listeners—and some who were connected to the broadcast.
Four years after Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany—violating provisions of the Versailles Treaty—a collaboration between the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) and a small cadre of social scientists and communications researchers created one of the most memorable phenomena in the history of mass media.
On October 30, 1938, two days after Hitler forced thousands of Polish Jews from their German homes and into Poland, Orson Welles, John Houseman, Howard Koch and their Mercury Theater on the Air alarmed listeners with the fictional broadcast about Martian marauders who were wreaking havoc on the northeastern US seaboard. The book was originally set in the England countryside, but Koch and Welles adapted it for a US audience, landing the extra terrestrials in a New Jersey hamlet called Grovers Mill.
According to estimates attributed at the time to the Gallup organization, around six million people tuned in to the program that evening, or about 13 million in today’s US population. It is believed that about one million (a little over two million today) were said to have been fooled by the performance.
What the listeners of the program didn't know was that, with the prospect of entering the war looming, they were more or less part of a large-scale lab experiment - an examination of how communications affects the public's reaction to certain events."
1 comment:
Is the article saying that it would take 2 million people today to be as gullible as 1 million in 1938? I wonder how to measure that in light of the barrage of advertising we filter each day -- compared with the USA of 1938.
Or that in addition to the 1 million gullibles of the past era (how old were they? many may be alive - are they still gullible or did they learn to be more skeptical?), there is a new crop of gullibles? : )
What would it take today to get 13 million people to listen to a long radio program with a similar story ... before they went to the internet for confirmation, blogging, whatever? And compared to "real news" of the last decade or so (Jon Benet, OJ, Monica, Elian (remember him?), Michael Jackson, etc), what would it take to hold people's interest?
We need some more "hard" "social science" numbers here!
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