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    Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles's War of the World's and the Art of Fake News
    Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles's War of the World's and the Art of Fake News
    Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles's War of the World's and the Art of Fake News
    Audiobook10 hours

    Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles's War of the World's and the Art of Fake News

    Written by A. Brad Schwartz

    Narrated by Sean Runnette

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    On October 30, 1938, families across the country were gathered around their radios when their regular programming was interrupted by an announcer delivering news of a meteor strike in New Jersey. With increasing intensity, the announcer read bulletins describing terrifying war  machines moving toward New York City. As the invading force approached, some listeners sat transfixed before their radios, while others ran to alert neighbors or call the police. Some even fled their homes in panic. But the broadcast was not breaking news-it was Orson Welles' adaptation of the H. G. Wells classic, The War of the Worlds.

    In Broadcast Hysteria, A. Brad Schwartz examines the history behind the infamous radio play. Did it really spawn a wave of mass hysteria? Schwartz is the first to examine the hundreds of letters sent directly to Orson Welles after the broadcast. He draws upon them, hundreds more sent to the FCC, to recapture the roiling emotions of a bygone era, and his findings challenge conventional wisdom. Relatively few listeners believed an actual attack was underway. But even so, Schwartz shows that Welle's broadcast prompted a different kind of "mass panic" as Americans debated the bewitching power of the radio and the country's vulnerabilities in a time of crisis. Schwartz's original research gifted storytelling, and thoughtful analysis make Broadcast Hysteria a groundbreaking work of media history.

    A .Brad  Schwartz  is the author of Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles's War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015). The book is based on his groundbreaking research into the infamous 1938 "panic broadcast," conducted as part of his senior thesis in history at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Brad also co-wrote a 2013 episode of the PBS series American Experience about the War of the Worlds broadcast, based in part on his thesis research.

    Brad received his BA in History and Screen Arts Cultures from the University of Michigan in 2012. As part of the University selective screenwriting program, he wrote Open House, a murder-mystery/comedy short film that premiered at the Traverse City Film Festival in 2013. It has since screened as official selection of NewFilmmakers Los Angeles and the 2014 Maryland International Film Festival.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateMay 5, 2015
    ISBN9781622317561
    Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles's War of the World's and the Art of Fake News
    Author

    A. Brad Schwartz

    A. Brad Schwartz is the author of Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles's War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News, based in part on research from his senior thesis at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He cowrote a documentary about the War of the Worlds broadcast for the PBS series American Experience. He is currently a doctoral candidate in American history at Princeton University.

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    Reviews for Broadcast Hysteria

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    • 3/5
      "Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles's War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News" by A. Brad Schwartz compels the reader to run to the nearest dictionary for the definitions of both panic and hysteria, for Schwartz again and again makes the point that what resulted from the famous "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast in 1938 was not panic, but hysteria. Never mind that he sometimes uses the word panic himself.My nearest dictionary, the Oxford American, defines panic as "sudden terror, wild infectious fear" and hysteria as "wild uncontrollable emotion or excitement." So, yes, although both definitions use the word wild, terror and fear sound much more severe than emotion and excitement. That seems to be Schwartz's point, that reaction to the broadcast was not as severe as popularly held.Relatively few people actually tuned in to the "Mercury Theatre on the Air" that night. It drew less than 4 percent of the radio audience, which was still about four million listeners. (A later estimate makes that 2 percent.) The largest audience by far listened to "The Chase & Sunburn Hour" featuring Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. Yet just as today people tend to channel surf during commercial breaks, so radio listeners sometimes turned their dials to other stations during commercials or musical numbers. These may have been the people most likely to believe something serious was going on. Many such people even missed the part about aliens from Mars. They thought this apparent news report was about human invaders. Adding to the problem was that the first act of the production was closer to 40 minutes long than the usual 30, meaning that there was no break for station identification at the usual point. And the show did not have any sponsors, so there were no commercial breaks.Amazingly radio broadcasters of that day considered it unethical to broadcast recordings of actual speeches and other news events. Instead they would recreate these events using actors and sound effects. So radio personnel were very skilled at making the phony sound like the real thing, which is what the "War of the Worlds" script called for.Although Schwartz himself puts most of the focus of his book on Orson Welles, he points out that Welles was not as responsible for the program as he later claimed and as is widely believed. John Houseman directed the production, which was written by Howard Koch. Welles was the star, but he was a busy young man at that time and couldn't even find time to attend the rehearsal. Only later, after it was clear there would be no legal repercussions, did Welles claim he was the driving force behind the production.Hundreds of people who heard the broadcast that night wrote letters, whether to CBS, the FCC, newspapers, Welles himself or some other party, stating their reactions. Schwartz gained access to the letters and uses them extensively. Sometimes it seems chapters are little more than quotes from these letters strung together. Yet it is clear from at least some of them that for some listeners that night there was much more terror and fear than emotion and excitement.
    • 3/5
      I was disappointed that we got SO MUCH on the Welles broadcast and biography and so little on the kinds of fake news phenomena it inspired around the world. Also, where were mentions of Fox News and RT, two of the biggest propaganda networks propping up far-right politics and xenophobic bigotry? I think this book was a great idea that missed out in execution.
    • 4/5
      Very interesting story about what the War of the World's effect it had on the world from when it was happening and over the years. Also, it is interesting how now something like a tweet that is fake can go viral. I have a journalism degree and I have always been interested in the news media so this was fascinating to me. Great as an audiobook.