Whose 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds caused a widespread national panic?
The 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds that famously caused widespread panic was directed and narrated by Orson Welles 🎬. The broadcast, a live Halloween special performed by Welles’s company, the Mercury Theatre on the Air, was an adaptation of H. G. Wells’s 1898 novel.
The Power of the Medium
The panic was not the result of the story’s content alone, but rather its groundbreaking format. Welles and his team presented the first two-thirds of the one-hour broadcast as a series of realistic news bulletins that interrupted a seemingly live music program. For listeners who tuned in late and missed the opening announcement that it was a dramatization, the reports of a Martian invasion of New Jersey seemed terrifyingly real.
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