From kidnappings to Martians, whipping up hysteria is old news

The ‘Martian Panic’ was a myth for which mainstream media was largely responsible, writes Terry Prone

MEDIA old-stagers, discomfited by the pretensions of social media about gathering and disseminating news, support their argument by pointing to episodes like an event in Mexico a couple of years ago. At that time, the city of Veracruz was so plagued by gang violence that residents, before they left their homes to go to work or to do the shopping, would visit Facebook or Twitter to find out which streets were safe.

Then came the day when posts went up claiming that children had been kidnapped from a school and that the kidnap involved helicopters armed with sub-machine guns. It wasn’t true, but it fit neatly into the grim expectations of the locals, so they got into their cars and rushed to rescue their children, causing dozens of car crashes as well as gridlock, and — because everybody was on the phone at the same time — wrecking the phone network. Two people later ended up in court accused of having started the frenzy, but didn’t end up in clink because they maintained all they were doing was passing on information already available on social media. “Don’t blame me,” went their song, “I didn’t make it up, I just retweeted it.” At official level, the episode was defined as having “caused more hysteria than Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds”.

That comparison is interesting, because when Orson Welles, in the 1930s, left American both shaken and stirred as the result of a radio broadcast, the US population had no possibility of retweeting any of his allegations. Back then, the mighty newspapers and their afffiliated radio stations were the Holy Grail of news-gathering, validation and transmission. A Brad Schwartz, the writer of a new book, Broadcast Hysteria, examined the hysteria Welles generated and to critically assess the role played by respectable mainstream media in the episode. Not good, is the short summary. Definitely not good.

The catalyst for what happened, Orson Welles, was an actor in his 20s who, at 16, had codded the management of Dublin’s Gate Theatre into giving him leading roles on the false basis that he was an experienced American actor. He did well in the Gate, but eventually went back to his home country. “Eventually” in this case, meant that he was in his early twenties. Welles, a mad workaholic with — arguably — a productive if acute case of ADHD, subsidised the Mercury Theatre, which he ran along with John Houseman and wherein he starred in and produced breakthrough works, by doing radio work. Radio, back then, being the most exciting mass medium around.

His live hour-long dramas attracted an audience, but not a gigantic audience. His production teams, accordingly, had no great hopes for the production of The War of the Worlds, based on HG Wells’ novel of the same name about a Martian invasion. Somewhere along the line, the idea of doing the show as a running news bulletin took hold, with “reporters” and “newsreaders” breaking into a music show to first announce the arrival of a spaceship carrying aliens from Mars in a town called Grover’s Mill in New Jersey. The location for the spaceship landing was selected at random as a place nobody ever heard of. That was to change, once the programme hit the airwaves.

The broadcast was amazingly realistic for the time. The tiny budget seemed to stimulate creativity: the woman in charge of sound effects created the scary noise of the space ship door opening by unscrewing a pickle jar in a bathroom. As the story progressed, it was established that the Martians had not come in peace, but were beaming lethal rays at people as they progressed. One area after another was recorded as having been devastated by the invaders.

The rest is history. The American population lost its marbles, shoving its furniture into its car and taking to the road to escape, causing countless lethal collisions. Those who did not own a car took to the streets and began to run in an aimless way. Some of them took their own lives and some of those who didn’t never recovered. Police forces were overwhelmed and the army was put on alert. Women, as panickers, were much worse than men. The story went global within days, so that Hitler mentioned it in a speech.

Now, what Schwartz’s book establishes is that this received wisdom is complete nonsense. Well, almost complete nonsense. Hitler did actually mention the supposed Martian invasion in a major speech. But setting the Führer to one side, the rest is fiction which has morphed, over time, into legend. A few people panicked. A very few. An actress in New York fell downstairs and broke her leg and the photograph of her and her injury was widely published. But no national terror frenzy happened. Even the state where the Martians were supposed to have landed didn’t get that upset.

The “Martian Panic” is a myth. It’s a myth, according to Schwartz, for which the mainstream media of the day, particularly newspapers, were largely responsible.

“Rather than acknowledge that their information was spotty and incomplete, most newspapers wildly generalised,” he says. “They focused on isolated cases of extreme hysteria and by either implication or overstatement, made it seem that behavior was widespread. Many newspapers reported on an incident in Newark, in which rumors of a ‘gas bomb attack’ convinced more than 20 families in a single neighbourhood to flee their homes. Police cars and an ambulance were called to the scene, where they found people loading furniture onto cars and wearing ‘wet handkerchiefs and towels over their faces’ as impromptu gas masks. The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times prominently featured this alarming anecdote, but made it clear that they were describing a single, isolated instance at a specific location. The New York Daily News, on the other hand, falsely applied it to the entire region: “Without waiting for further details, thousands of listeners rushed from their homes in New York and New Jersey, many with towels across their faces to protect themselves from the ‘gas’ which the invader was supposed to be spewing forth.’ By projecting the absurd behaviour of a handful of people onto the broadcast’s entire audience, the Daily News suggested the panic might be larger and more severe than it actually was. Other papers did much the same thing.”

The fact is that relatively few people heard the original programme when it was broadcast, the majority copped on quickly that it was fictional, and most of the remainder didn’t go frantic, but — logically — called the local newspaper or the copshop to find out what was going on. Consequently, newspapers realised they had a story to tell, but reporters had an acute shortage of reliable information, so they joined the dots by filling in the deficits with their own assumptions, writing the rough draft of a deeply inaccurate history. And creating a case study worthy of examination when mainstream media gets notions about its superiority over social media in news-validation terms.

The ‘Martian Panic’ was a myth for which mainstream media was largely responsible