Orson Welles' War of the Worlds

Recently in my Mass Communications class we listened to Orson Welles' War of the Worlds radio show. Now I've heard of the movie with Tom Cruise in it and knew it was based on some old radio show way back when, but I didn't know anything more than that. I didn't know of the effect it had on some people; I didn't know of the misinterpretation. It's incredible to hear about how people mistook the radio show for a real live broadcast.

In our Mass Communication book for class, sociologist W.I. Thomas is quoted about his beliefs on symbolic interactionism. Thomas says, "If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences." In other words, if people misinterpret something and convince themselves that the occurrence is real, then consequences will come to them. We can look back and see how this happened during Orson Welles' 1938 radio show. Even though there was an announcement before the broadcast started, stating that this was a show and not a real broadcast, people still took it as something that was actually happening.

Besides listening to Abbott and Costello's Who's on First? skit with my family, I had never actually listened to an old radio broadcast from that time period. So as I was listening to War of the Worlds I had to constantly remind myself that this was cutting edge entertainment back then. This type of entertainment is what families would gather around their living room radio for every night. To me, the hardest part about connecting with the people who must have felt that this was real was remembering that I grew up in the 21st century. That I have constantly been around loud explosions in movies all my life, and dramatic plots of how a main character betrayed another character. People back then didn't have this type of "high quality" entertainment.

When we were told that people took this radio show for an actual event taking place, I didn't know what to think. People killing themselves and taking cover because they thought martians were invading earth? No way! But then I started to think back to what W.I. Thomas said; about how people can convince themselves of something completely made up, and believe it to be real. When you see a breaking news story on television, what is it that most reporters say as it is taking place? "Again folks, this just happened; This is taking place as we speak; We are doing the best we can to get you all the info as this event is taking place right in front of our very eyes." Stuff like that right? During the War of the Worlds broadcast, reporters were in the storyline, reporting exactly like this. I think it would have been hard to completely break away from the show and say "Once again folks, this is NOT REAL; This is a radio show; Now back to War of the Worlds." But on the other hand, maybe they could have?