The Panic Broadcast: Who Really Panicked in 1938

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Panic Broadcast: Who Really Panicked in 1938

The Fires Series — Episode 84

On the night of October 30, 1938, Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre put a radio play on CBS in the form of breaking news bulletins: an ordinary music program interrupted, again and again, by increasingly frantic reporters describing Martian war machines landing in New Jersey. The story America has told itself ever since is that listeners believed it, and that the country dissolved into mass panic — highways clogged, people fleeing their homes, the National Guard called, a nation terrorized by a radio play.

It is a great story. It is also, in its important parts, a hoax about a hoax — and the second hoax was pulled by the people you’d least suspect.

The panic that mostly wasn’t

The audience for that broadcast was small. It ran opposite the most popular show on radio, and the ratings service of the day found that only about two percent of surveyed listeners were tuned to it at all — and many of those knew perfectly well they were hearing a Sunday-night drama, because the program said so, four times. There is no contemporary evidence of highways jammed with refugees or of the dead in the ditches. The “mass panic” is not something researchers have ever been able to locate at the scale of the legend.

So where did the legend come from? From the newspapers — and they had a motive. By 1938 radio had spent a decade eating the newspaper industry’s advertising revenue and, worse, beating it to the news. Here, gift-wrapped, was a chance to prove that this upstart medium was reckless, that it put fake news into the ears of a gullible public and touched off chaos. The next morning’s papers ran wall-to-wall with a panic they largely inflated, because a dangerous radio was good for the newspaper business. The academic study that cemented the panic in the record built its case on exactly that press coverage.

Sit with the shape of it. The famous media hoax of the twentieth century is real — Welles absolutely staged a fake newscast. But the bigger hoax, the durable one, the one still in your head right now, was staged by the incumbents against the disruptor, using the disruptor’s stunt as the pretext. Welles trolled the audience for an hour. The press trolled history for a century, and won.

When it wasn’t harmless

The form is older and darker than 1938. In January 1926 the BBC aired Father Ronald Knox’s “Broadcasting the Barricades,” a spoof news bulletin describing a riot sweeping London — Parliament under mortar fire, a government minister hanged from a lamppost — and a slice of the audience, unable to check against any other source in a fog-bound weekend, believed it. No one died.

Somebody did, eleven years later and a hemisphere away. On February 12, 1949, Radio Quito in Ecuador ran its own localized War of the Worlds. When the audience realized they’d been fooled, the fury turned on the station: a mob stormed and burned the building that housed the broadcaster and a newspaper, and people were killed. The same trick that in New Jersey produced a legend produced, in Quito, a body count. That is the line this whole series keeps drawing — the method is neutral until it meets a real crowd with real exits, and then it isn’t.

Television learned the trick too. On Halloween 1992 the BBC aired “Ghostwatch,” a scripted haunting dressed as a live investigation, complete with trusted presenters playing themselves. Roughly a million people called in; the fallout included documented trauma in viewers and a formal ruling against the broadcaster, and the BBC never aired it again.

The coda Welles gave himself

Welles knew exactly what he had done, and thirty-five years later he made a film about it. F for Fake (1973) is an essay-movie about forgers, frauds, and the authorship of illusion, narrated by the man whose most famous work was a fake newscast — a hoaxer’s honest confession that the whole trade, his own included, runs on the willing complicity of the fooled. He is the rare troll who circled back to annotate his own trick.

The lesson of the panic broadcast isn’t “people are gullible.” It’s subtler and more useful: when a hoax causes a stir, ask who benefits from the story of the stir. In 1938 it wasn’t the man behind the microphone. It was the men who owned the presses, and they got you to remember their version. Lurk more — and when someone tells you the crowd panicked, find out who counted the crowd.

Source URLs

“The Myth of the War of the Worlds Panic” (Pooley & Socolow) — Slate: https://slate.com/culture/2013/10/orson-welles-war-of-the-worlds-panic-myth-the-infamous-radio-broadcast-did-not-cause-a-nationwide-hysteria.html
The War of the Worlds (1938 radio drama) — Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds_(1938_radio_drama)
“Broadcasting the Barricades” (Ronald Knox, BBC 1926) — Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcasting_the_Barricades
Radio Quito / El Comercio 1949 broadcast and riot — Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds_(1949_radio_drama)
Ghostwatch (BBC, 1992) — Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostwatch
F for Fake (1973) — Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F_for_Fake

The Fires Series — Misinformation

The Panic Broadcast: Who Really Panicked in 1938

The Panic Broadcast: Who Really Panicked in 1938

The panic that mostly wasn’t

When it wasn’t harmless

The coda Welles gave himself

Source URLs