http://www.brainsturbator.com/articles/war_of_the_worlds_take_another_look/

http://www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/view/1356/1421

Aftermath

Never before had the creative possibilities of radio been so effectively used, or abused. By the time the broadcast ended, the CBS Building was inundated with police and the press. Welles and co-producer John Houseman were dragged to a back office and held for questioning. The newspaper reporters were especially voracious. Both men have described the experience as unnerving, since at that point the damage caused seemed like a worst-case scenario. Numerous deaths were implied, most allegedly occurring on the highways during the evacuation stampede. Fortunately for everyone at Mercury it would be later revealed that no deaths could be attributed to the program. In the post-broadcast confusion, however, it seemed as if the New Jersey Turnpike had claimed as many victims as the Martian heat ray.

The press scrum ended without any arrests and much still to be learned. On the morrow, as details and consequences of the broadcast burned up wire services and filled front pages, Welles was called back to CBS for a formal press conference that was to be filmed. He read a prepared statement, one reprinted in newspapers nationwide, and fielded questions. He denied any malicious intent, noting that the broadcast had been announced in the papers and that its fictional nature - he refers to it as a “fantasy” and a “fairy tale” - was declared at the outset, and during the station break and conclusion. True enough, but what he failed to note is that the station break came 42 minutes into the broadcast, with nothing prior to it, save the introduction most people missed or ignored, indicating that the program was a dramatization. In the pre-audiotape and pre-videotape year of 1938, it must be remembered, nobody but CBS had access to an acetate recording of the program, and they were not about to release it to the press.

In retrospect, the press conference represents one of Welles’ greatest acting performances. He must have sensed that his future in radio and career in all media might be on the line. Unshaven, glassy-eyed, and feigning sincerity, he looked more like the victim of the Martian invasion than its perpetrator. Luckily for him nobody mentioned his use of dead air, microphone testing, sloppy eyewitness interviews, or any of the other remarkable devices his media sense led him to employ for the sake of realism. Not only the story format, but the techniques used to implement it had diverged considerably from those used in conventional radio dramas.

Throughout his subsequent career he would be asked often to discuss his true intentions in staging the broadcast. Did he really hope to precipitate a panic? He eventually admitted to a bit of sensationalism in a 1970s interview with Peter Bogdanovich: “The kind of response, yes - that was merrily anticipated by all of us. The size of it of course, was flabbergasting” (Welles & Bogdanovich, 1992, p. 18). Ironically, on the morning of December 7, 1941, Welles was on the air doing a literary reading when he was interrupted by a news bulletin declaring that Pearl Harbor was under attack. Some listeners no doubt experienced a moment of radio déjà vu, and Welles later received a telegram from the president commenting on the coincidence (Welles & Bogdanovich, 1992, p. 20).

The Panic Broadcast was given major press coverage for days, and in some areas of the country for weeks after. The finger of culpability was pointed in turn at Welles, CBS, the American public, and radio itself. In some cases Welles was portrayed as a Svengali or Rasputin-like figure who had used his dramatic legerdemain to bewitch a nation. In less personal indictments, CBS was called to account for failing to monitor its programming more closely. Most newspapers regarded as totally justified the upcoming FCC (Federal Communications Commission) investigation of the broadcast. As a result of the investigation, radio dramas would be monitored more carefully - for their manner of presentation as well as their content. Regulations would be effected to prevent mixing news formats with fiction in the extreme way of the Panic Broadcast. Again, parallels can be drawn with the aftermath of September 11: telecommunications policy, especially with respect to cellular telephone usage, came under scrutiny; and airline security underwent a dramatic overhaul.

Further:

The view from academe

With the popular press spilling so much ink over the incident, it was inevitable that academe would follow suit. Almost a year prior to the broadcast, the organization destined to put it under a microscope was founded. A grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to Princeton University helped create the Princeton Office of Radio Research. The director was Paul Lazarsfeld, an Austrian-Jewish emigré and social psychologist whose expertise in quantitative methods was tempered by a humanist leaning. He teamed with two associates, psychologist Hadley Cantril and CBS researcher Frank Stanton, a Ph.D. in psychology who would eventually become network president.

The project was formed in response to the increasing influence of radio on public life. Although the agenda was fluid, the primary leaning was toward studying the content of radio programming, the type of audience it attracted, and their reactions to the medium. Polls were used as well as questionnaires and demographic data. Lazarsfeld was particularly interested in contrasting the radio audience with those who relied more on print media. In 1940 he published Radio and the Printed Page, one of the most significant publications to emerge from the research group, which by 1939 had moved to Columbia University in New York to be closer to the radio action. This media think-tank was highly influential in establishing the empirical study of mass communication as an academic field in the United States. The catchphrase often attributed to it is “Who says what to whom and with what effect.” Their emphasis on content and how radio is controlled had little to say regarding the nature of the medium per se, and Lazarsfeld would be later chastised for this omission by McLuhan (1964).

In the aftermath of the Martian visit, Cantril organized a study of its impact. The result is a revealing book, Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic (1940). With help from researchers Hazel Gaudet and Herta Herzog, and the co-operation of Welles and Howard Koch, who co-wrote the radio play, Cantril examined numerous aspects of the broadcast. If we use the above catchphrase to describe his project, the “who says what” part is covered by a reprint of the radio play along with a brief discussion of the circumstances surrounding its production; “to whom” is dealt with by using demographic data on the broadcast’s audience; and “with what effect” is gleaned from a 10-page interview questionnaire given to 135 people, supplemented by press data. The book has become an important case study for scholars of mass media and its history.

Enter Marshall McLuhan in 1964. As alluded to earlier, he was fascinated by the Panic Broadcast and what it revealed about the nature of radio. In Understanding Media he observes how Welles used the auditory involving power of radio to tap primal fears and emotions - anticipating what Hitler was about to do in reality. He also perceived Welles’ approach as one that recognized how the “subliminal depths of radio are charged with the resonating echoes of tribal horns and antique drums” (1964, p. 261), serving as “an echo chamber” for the evocation of “long and forgotten chords” (p. 264). Welles’ many radio plays, especially the aforementioned Dracula, provide ample evidence for such an observation.

That McLuhan would be interested in Welles makes perfect sense, although we have no idea how familiar Welles was with the Canadian media guru’s ideas.7 Just as McLuhan, a polymath intellectual and acclaimed “Oracle of the Electronic Media,” understood media perhaps better than any intellectual of the twentieth century, so the multitalented Welles seemed to grasp better than any of his contemporaries how the properties of various media could be used to further artistic ends. In McLuhan’s case, his scholarly media sense yielded insights into communication and culture that continue to inspire both academic researchers and artists working in a variety of disciplines. With respect to Welles, his reputation as one of the twentieth century’s most important and influential artists seems to grow with each passing year.