On the evening of October 30, 1938, CBS Radio aired a Halloween-eve drama by Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre troupe. It adapted H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds as a string of realistic news bulletins about Martians landing in New Jersey. The next morning, newspapers across the country described a nation in hysteria: people fleeing their homes, phone lines jammed, panic in the streets.
That story has been retold for decades as the ultimate lesson in how gullible audiences can be. There's a catch. Much of it appears to have been exaggerated, and the people who exaggerated it were not the listeners.
What the evidence shows
Some people really were frightened, and some did call police stations and newspapers. But historians who have gone back through the records, including media scholars Michael Socolow and Jefferson Pooley, argue that the mass panic was largely a myth. A ratings survey taken around that night reportedly found only a small share of the audience tuned in to the broadcast. Most were listening to something else, especially NBC's far more popular Chase and Sanborn Hour, or had the radio off. The scale of the "panic" depended on a story that was told afterward.
Who benefited from the story
Radio was taking advertising money from newspapers in the 1930s, and the two industries had been in open conflict. A front-page story about a reckless, dangerous new medium was good for papers. The panic story spread through the same newspapers that were competing with radio, and a later academic study of the broadcast, published in 1940, gave it a veneer of scientific backing.
Why this matters for you
The lesson isn't that people are foolish. The story about a misinformation event can itself be misinformation. A dramatic claim that fits a satisfying narrative, and that is repeated by many outlets, can feel solid without being true. Before you share something, ask who is telling the story, what they gain from it, and what the original evidence says.
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