ABSTRACT
On October 30, 1938, on the day of Halloween, the CBS radio network broadcast a dramatised version of H.G. Wells’s novel, War of the Worlds. According to eyewitness reports,1 the programme directed by Orson Welles caused great panic among some of its listeners who were led to believe that the news bulletins included in the show and announcing an imminent alien invasion of the earth was real. Owing to a combination of exaggerated storytelling, interviews with pseudoscientists and realistic special effects of cosmic-scale conflict, this well-crafted radio drama remains a well-known episode of twentieth-century media history for provoking the prompt reaction of the public authorities, who subsequently imposed stricter regulations on broadcasters. However much this episode revealed about public confusion of fiction and reality, it also indicates the influence that a dramatic staging can have on an audience. Admittedly, what triggered that brief moment of mass panic was the programme director’s understanding of how the form of a news bulletin can act upon listeners: an audience would take for granted the information because of the form in which that information was moulded.
