UNITED STATES

Terrifying War of the Worlds broadcast 80 years ago scored as fake news

October 30, 2018

The broadcast of The War of the Worlds 80 years ago claimed that aliens from Mars had invaded the state of New Jersey. Believable enough to terrify its audience, it scored a perfect 10 as fake news.

The 1938 broadcast was intended as an entertainment. Eighty years on, fake news has changed and has taken on sinister overtones. Propaganda by another name, it is perpetrated to cause harm. It has skewed elections, ruined reputations and steered behavior. The viral tailwind of today’s social media amplifies the harm.

Smithsonian magazine notes that Orson Welles, the performer of the radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’s 40-year-old novel, The War of the Worlds, found himself the most talked-about man in America after the broadcast. His face and name were on the front pages of newspapers coast-to-coast, along with headlines about the mass panic his CBS broadcast had allegedly inspired.

No one involved with War of the Worlds expected to deceive any listeners, according to the Smithsonian, because they all found the story too silly and improbable to ever be taken seriously. The magazine notes that the theater’s desperate attempts to make the show seem halfway believable succeeded, almost by accident, far beyond even their wildest expectations.

The fake news of the 21st Century takes on many forms, ranging for believable-sounding fiction, to genuine news that is mixed in varying proportions with deliberate misinformation and disinformation. While credulous individuals are the most vulnerable, no one is immune from being fooled, and fact-checking sites have become commonplace.

The New York Times reported in Nov 2017 that Facebook and Google plan to crack down on fake news sites. The companies have faced mounting criticism over how fake news on their sites may have influenced the outcome of the 2016 presidential election in the United States, according to the newspaper.

#22401 Published: December 4, 2017