War of the Worlds: Blog tasks
FACTSHEET 176
1) War of the Worlds is a broadcast adapted from H.G Wells' 1898 novel.
3) The NY Times reported it as "Radio Listeners in Panis, Taking War Drama as Fact" - again highlighting the mass hysteria caused by the hoax broadcast.
4) Schwartz suggests that reportings of the broadcast's impact was not purely exaggerated; he implies that the effect it had was actually an example of a "viral-media phenomenon." He suggests that the show actualy offered a "fascinating window into how users engage with media content, spreading and reinterpreting it."
5) He used hybrid genres in order to heighten the effect that it had on audiences - he combined the conventions of radio broadcasting with the conventions of news and storyteling. By blurring these two together, it caused more people to believe it as it paralleled to texts that the audience were already familiar with.
6) In the run-up to the broadcast, scheduled radio reports were interrupted with emergency cut-ins, giving the audineces breaking news and updates surrounding Hitler's plans to invade and start the next world war.
7) CBS
8) The radio industry was relatively new at the time and newspapers were under threat as radio became a new competitor - they exaggerated the repsonse to the broadcast in an attempt to create a panic surrounding the impact of the radio industry, and cause them to lose listeners.
9) The Hypodermic Needle theory suggests that consumers are "passive" in the way that they consume and react to the media. The response to the broadcast supports this theory, as masses of people believed the broadcast without cosndiering the evidence etc. Additionally, the fact that this similar style of broadcast hoax was repeated in Quito Ecuador and Buffalo and people stil reacted in a hysterical way demonstrates how consumers still passively consume the media and believe whatever is fed to them.
10) Cultivation theory suggests that the more we consume a form of media, the more susceptible we become to the effects of it. This applies to the War of the Worlds broadcast, because the more people listened to the radio and familiarised themselves with the conventions of cut-ins, breaking news and journalistic-style reporting, the more predisposed they were to believing the hoax and recording.
11) Preferred reading - a broadcast designed to show the impact of the media and highlight the fact that you should not believe everything that you hear through the media without checking the facts and details yourself.
Oppositional reading - the broadcast was a way of taking advantage of the fears people already had, it was wrong to create such a believable hoax as it then went on to be replicated and cause the deaths of people in Quito Ecuador etc.
12) I think that media products do still have the ability to fool audiences. I think that this is particularly valid for older audiences, as they are more likely to be fearful or panic about the impact that technology has. However, I do think that audiences have become more aware of how the media can be manipulated and altered to create certain meanings as our society has become more saturated with media so we are more knowledgeable about what is considered fake/what is real.
Analysis and opinion
1) I think that it has become a significant broadcast in history because of the impact that it had on listeners at the time, and for years after. It is a demonstration of the fact that consumers can be manipulated by the media, and that media texts are constructed to evoke certain emotions and bring about a particular response.
2) War of the Worlds feels like a 1938 version of 'fake news'. But which is the greater example of fake news - Orson Welles's use of radio conventions to create realism or the newspapers exaggerating the audience reaction to discredit radio?
I think that the newspapers exaggerating the audinece reaction is more of an example of fake news. This is because even though both of these media texts were fake to some extent, the broadcast ultimately used the conventions of typical broadcast to create a realistic broadcast. The newspapers manipulated these conventions to exaggerate the effects in an attempt to encourage audience's to fear the impact of the radio.
3) I do agree with the Frankfurt School's Hypodermic Needle theory; I think that audiences are positioned to consume media without necessarily thinking about the way it may have been mediated or manipulated by the producers to cause the reaction they want. However, I think that the theory may be disproved by the fact that our knowledge surrounding the audience's reaction to the WOTW broadcast stems from the newspapers and their headlines - the fact that these were exaggerated could mean that audiences were not as susceptible as we assumed to be.
4) I think that the digital age has made the Hypodermic Needle model less relevant in the 21st century. This is because more sources are available for different aspects of news and media content in general. Also, I think that as a result of growing up with digital media and an ever-changing media landscape, the younger audiences are more familiar with how to spot/handle fake news.
5) I agree with Gerbner's cultivation theory. I think that this theory applies to a wide range of media products and texts. It is clearly applicable to the WOTW broadcast, because people believed the content of the radio broadcast as a result of it being similar to the format of news that they were used to - their regular consumption of the radio and news made them more susceptible to being fooled. Another example, constant exposure to violent videogames may encourage younger children to mimic this behaviour in real life.
6) I think that Gerbner's Cultivation theory is more relevant today due to the fact that there are more forms of media. The increased usage and reliance on media texts and products has meant that our behaviour and beliefs can become more impacted by what we learn through these texts.
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