One Mercury Theatre voice actor did an FDR impression for his politician character, with some deniability. In contrast, as Schwartz notes, 1930s Federal Communications Commission regulations forbade radio announcers from impersonating FDR, the current president. No wonder people like my grandmother were terrified or confused, tuning in somewhere in the middle.Īs a teen in the 2000s, I laughed at satirical “fake news,” including impressions of politicians. That’s 40 minutes of uninterrupted fake news, without context. Schwartz notes that Welles’s broadcast used realistic sound effects and an unusually late break 2/3 of the way through. The radio show supposedly caused widespread panic, in part because radio was a new technology. Welles, who was 23 at the time, woke up to dozens of angry, front-page newspaper headlines after his broadcast. Brad Schwartz, author of Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News, Welles had the idea of a fictional radio broadcast formatted like a news bulletin even before his team chose that book. This interpretation also expresses guilt over colonization and draws on the fear that Britain would be invaded. It exaggerates differences among humans and equates technology with a “superior” society. Wells’s famous science fiction novel imagines what would happen if Martians did to Great Britain what Europeans did to Tasmania.” Wills quotes Aaron Worth calling it an “imperial satire.” Wells’s preface critiques colonialism, but is racist and problematic in itself.

The broadcast illustrates how fast misconceptions can spread and why media literacy and clear content warnings are important. The novel still influences the sci-fi genre today, drawing on timeless fears of invasion. Of course, my grandmother’s story is not evidence of a nationwide evacuation attempt, but it made me fascinated with The War of the Worlds and its radio broadcast. There were dozens of confused, angry calls to police and radio stations, which some journalists later assumed was a nationwide panic. They weren’t the only people who thought the broadcast might have been real. Still, it’s easy to imagine how they heard the broadcast out of context and consequently panicked. My grandmother and her neighbors realized it was fiction before they started evacuating. Wells’s 40-year-old sci-fi novel The War of the Worlds, narrated by Orson Welles. The “news report” was actually The Mercury Theatre on the Air’s infamous broadcast of H.G. On October 30, 1938, she heard the middle of an apparent news broadcast about Martians invading New Jersey and coming up the East Coast - towards her state! Her family couldn’t afford a radio but listened at a wealthy neighbor’s house. In 1938, during the Great Depression, my grandmother was a teenager and one of ten kids of a Portuguese immigrant farmer in Massachusetts.

War of the worlds novel