1938 - THE PANIC BY RADIO

                                       October 30 1938, the United States experienced a kind of mass hysteria that was never  seen before. Thousands of people believed they were under attack by Martians. They flooded newspaper offices and radio with weapons  and police stations with calls, asking how to flee their city or how they should protect themselves from Martian invasion and gas raids.

                                       Orson Welles had rewritten the story of War of the Worlds (by H.G WELLS). The introduction to War of the Worlds broadcast on CBS Radio emphasized that it was based on the H.G. Wells novel and was just a drama play, not reality.

                                       The script transformed the novel into a radio play.Besides shortening the story, they also updated it by changing the location and time from Victorian England to present day New England. The chaos among people was caused as a great amount of audience tuned in to the radio late, after the warning of the broadcast being a drama adaptation was mentioned.

                                        
                                      We live in a time in which the ability to create deceptive simulations, for television, newspaper and radio, has become essential to the exercise of power. And the inability to see through these deceptions has become a form of powerlessness. Those who let themselves be taken in by the deceptions of politics, news, advertising and public relations, are doomed, like the more gullible members of the radio audience in 1938.