Fake news and false memories: the War of the Worlds and the phony panic.

• Author: Socolow, Michael J.
• Position: Book review

Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles's War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News, by A. Brad Schwartz, Hill and Wang, 416 pages, $35.

THE WAR OF THE WORLDS has become a historical Rorschach test. Some people are convinced the legendary radio drama drove panicked hordes into America's streets. Others treat that story more skeptically, arguing that the terror induced by Orson Welles' masterpiece has been significantly overblown. As the years recede, the debate over the events of Sunday, October 30,1938, often appears unresolvable. In classrooms, online, in print, and in documentaries, everyone seems to use the panic story to validate their preconceptions about media power and mass audiences. The existing historical evidence apparently allows all of us to find the panic, or calm, we believe happened that night.

Into this debate steps filmmaker A. Brad Schwartz, whose Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles's War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News commemorates the centenary of Welles' birth. Schwartz is a talented writer, and Broadcast Hysteria does an effective job of reminding readers that radio's intimate power in the 1930s is almost unimaginable in today's multiplatform media environment. The book revisits the night when Welles and his talented crew supposedly shook America with fright. It offers a condensed Welles biography, details the brilliance of Welles' collaborators, and delivers an interesting contextual discussion of American commercial radio and its regulatory framework in the 1930s. Schwartz further includes a comprehensive exposition of how the panic story first emerged, and then became sustained, over the decades since that fateful night.

Much of this tale has already been told. Others have extensively explored the technical artistry of the Mercury Theatre crew and the tragic story of how The War of the Worlds paradoxically proved both the greatest blessing and worst curse of Welles' life. But Schwartz interweaves strong chapters covering the shoddy journalism that framed the event and the role of 1940's The Invasion from Mars, a famous but flawed social science text, in perpetuating the panic legend. Broadcast Hysteria concludes by reminding us that the issues raised by The War of the Worlds--including mass media power, how it affects us, how it is regulated, and the relationship between dramatic and journalistic techniques--remain largely unresolved today.

The book reflects a remarkable research effort. Schwartz located, read, and...