Was the small audience that listened to War of the Worlds excited by what they heard? Certainly. But what supposedly set Welles’ show apart was the “panic,” and even terror, it instilled in its audience. Worse, Cantril committed an obvious categorical error by conflating being “frightened,” “disturbed,” or “excited” by the program with being “panicked.” In the late 1930s, radio audiences were regularly “excited” and “frightened” by suspenseful dramas. But this cherry-picked data set was clearly tainted by the sensationalistic newspaper publicity following the broadcast (a possibility Cantril also admitted). But the AIPO survey, as Cantril himself admitted, offered an audience rating “over 100 per cent higher than any other known measure of this audience.” Cantril defended his reliance on AIPO data by noting that it surveyed homes without telephones and small communities often overlooked by radio ratings agencies. Relying heavily on a skewed report compiled six weeks after the broadcast by the American Institute of Public Opinion, The Invasion From Mars, by Princeton’s Hadley Cantril, estimated that about 1 million people were “frightened” by War of the Worlds. In 1940, an esteemed academic solidified the myth in the public mind. The legend of the panic, however, grew exponentially over the following years. ( Radiolab played the Chase and Sanborn Hour’s musical interlude for its audience, as if the song itself constituted evidence that people of course switched to Welles’ broadcast.) The data collected was simply not specific enough for us to know how many listeners might have switched over to Welles-just as we can’t estimate how many people turned their radios off, or switched from Mercury Theatre on the Air over to NBC’s Chase and Sanborn Hour either. No scholar, however, has ever isolated or extrapolated an actual number of dial twirlers. “Just at that moment thousands, hundreds, we don’t how many listeners, started to dial-surf, where they landed on the Mercury Theatre on the Air,” explained Radiolab this weekend. But the documentary’s script goes on to claim that “millions of listeners began twirling the dial” when the opening comedy routine on the Chase and Sanborn Hour gave way to a musical interlude. The new PBS documentary allows that, “of the tens of millions of Americans listening to their radios that Sunday evening, few were tuned to the War of the Worlds” when it began, due to Bergen’s popularity. Welles’ program was scheduled against one of the most popular national programs at the time-ventriloquist Edgar Bergen’s Chase and Sanborn Hour, a comedy-variety show. In other words, 98 percent of those surveyed were listening to something else, or nothing at all, on Oct. None said a “news broadcast,” according to a summary published in Broadcasting. Only 2 percent answered a radio “play” or “the Orson Welles program,” or something similar indicating CBS. “To what program are you listening?” the service asked respondents. Hooper ratings service telephoned 5,000 households for its national ratings survey. How do we know? The night the program aired, the C.E. But that was hardly the case.įar fewer people heard the broadcast-and fewer still panicked-than most people believe today. As weeks, months, and years passed, the audience’s size swelled to such an extent that you might actually believe most of America was tuned to CBS that night. A curious (but predictable) phenomenon occurred: As the show receded in time and became more infamous, more and more people claimed to have heard it. 31, 1938, the apocryphal apocalypse only grew in the retelling. From these initial newspaper items on Oct.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |