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Keywords: Communication History; Broadcasting; Mass media effects; Radio
Paul Heyer is a Professor in the Faculty of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, 75 University Avenue West, Waterloo, ON N2L 3C5. E-mail: [email protected]
All facts and personages in world history occur, as it were, twice--the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.
--Karl Marx
In the century following the one in which Marx penned these words, the fictions of film, radio, and television began to make possible a reversal of this dictum that opens the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852). Before the tragic attack on America of September 11, 2001, there was the farcical (yet unnerving) attack of October 30, 1938: Orson Welles' War of the Worlds radio broadcast. It terrified an estimated two million people in Eastern North America,(1) with the epicentre of the panic located in the Greater New York area.
Orson Welles' use of fictional news reports as the narrative framework for what now seems an obviously hyperbolic radio drama uncannily anticipated the reportage of more recent tragedies such as the assassination of JFK, the death of Britain's Princess Diana, and the attacks of September 11. As the world stood on the threshold of the Second World War, so convincing was Welles' use of the medium that even some listeners who found the idea of a Martian invasion ridiculous nonetheless assumed the attack (which we would today unhesitatingly label terrorist) to be the result of German military aggression. They reacted to the broadcast with equal horror to those who took it at face value, believing that either the announcer had made an interpretive mistake or the invading German forces themselves were disguised as Martians! This ability to manipulate radio impressed no less an authority on mass communications than Marshall McLuhan, who in Understanding Media (1964), used Welles' War of the Worlds broadcast to help him explore the auditory conventions and power of broadcast radio.
Welles' "media sense"
The fact that Welles was able to push radio conventions to their limit in the Panic Broadcast--as his War of the Worlds dramatization came to be known--was no accident. He had been developing effective radio formats throughout the previous year and had emerged as one of the medium's reigning stars. Radio drama, however,...