Column: Martians & Media Literacy

.
I’ll take Martians over media illiteracy
By Ted Pease
©1996

For students of mass communication, Halloween is a time of year to stop and ponder anew the public’s astonishing gullibility, and to reaffirm the media’s responsibility not to mislead.

The reason that the holiday is so revered has nothing to do with its attractions for most Americans (who now spend more money on Halloween than on any other holiday but Christmas). Journalists and media scholars love Halloween because it is the anniversary of one of the all-time greatest media hoaxes—the day that Martians invaded New Jersey.

You remember the story: On the night before Halloween 1938, radio director Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre actors reenacted H.G. Wells’ 1898 novel “The War of the Worlds” over 151 CBS radio stations nationwide. Unidentified flying objects had taken off from Mars and were “moving toward the Earth with enormous velocity,” landing near the farming community of Grovers Mill, N.J., according to breathless “newscasts” created by the Mercury Theatre cast in New York City.

Martian heat rays incinerated the innocent and destroyed Trenton, N.J. Giant Martian machines “as tall as skyscrapers” and emitting poisonous black smoke, marched on New York, wading across the Hudson River into Manhattan. The National Guard was called out, but the troops were helpless against the horrible Martian weapons. Other Martian spacecraft were reported near Buffalo, St. Louis and Chicago. By the time the Mercury broadcast ended, 40 minutes later, the aliens had taken over the country.

Big practical joke, right?

An estimated 6 million radio listeners heard the broadcast, and social scientists later said about 1 million of them believed it. In New York City, families rushed together to await their death. New Jersey farmers armed with shotguns crouched behind barricades of hay bales and grain sacks to repel the aliens. Police and National Guards troops mobilized all over the country. The New York Times received 875 phone calls from frightened citizens. The Memphis, Tenn., Press-Scimitar published a nighttime “extra” edition about the invasion of Chicago and St. Louis.

Meanwhile, New York City police officers who rushed to the CBS studio were stunned to see the actors, “stoically before the microphones, reading their scripts, ignorant of the havoc they were creating throughout the land.”

Afterward, Orson Welles innocently expressed surprise that anyone had taken his broadcast seriously: “How could they?” he said. “They were told several times it wasn’t real.” The show was just the actors way “of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying ‘Boo!’” he said.

Today, 58 years later, I’m thinking that for all our sophistication in the “information age,” Americans actually may be less savvy about what we hear, see, read and experience in the media than we were in 1938, simply because media have become such an accepted part of our daily lives.

Sure, we probably wouldn’t buy into Orson Welles’ radio gag today (even though promotions for the movie “Independence Day,” about aliens attacking Washington, D.C., prompted similar 911 calls in some markets), but in many ways we are even more malleable now than we were in the 1930s.

The reason is that so much of what we take as “reality” and common knowledge—whether political ads and spin-doctoring during election campaigns, or the importance of Barbie and the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers in our kids’ lives, or our insatiable need for new cars, clothes, appliances or other gadgets—comes to us through the mass media. Like the radio listeners that night in 1938, our daily lives are formed by the environment created for us by mass media messages, and our impressions of the world around us derive from the media’s version of “reality.”

Radio listeners of the 1930s generally knew to use the medium as entertainment, or as an “electronic hearth” around which families, friends and strangers gathered to form an extended national community. Radio helped hold a nation together during the Depression and World War II, and it became a part of the family.

Ironically, for all our electronic sophistication today, we are in some ways less critical consumers of mass media messages than we used to be. That’s because so much of what we do every day is based on knowledge we get from the mass media, which is no longer an activity we select but has become ubiquitous electronic wallpaper. There are nearly six radios in every American home, and more TVs than toilets. Aside from sleeping, we spend more time with television and radio than doing anything else. We eat, breathe, talk, think, swim in a biosphere of mass media messages, so much so that most of us think about our media diet about as much as we think about the air we breathe.

We might not fall for Martians in 1996, but ultimately we fall for much more. Item: 80 percent of fourth-grade girls say they are on diets, and the same percentage of American women think they are overweight. Item: More than half of white conservatives and 45 percent of white liberals think “blacks are aggressive or violent.” Where do you suppose those perceptions come from?
Most of what we think we “know” comes from the mass media.

Here’s a True or False quiz:
1.) Rapists and welfare recipients are more likely to be black than white.
2.) Handguns are used more often for self-defense than for suicide.
3.) Violent crime in the United States is on the rise.
4.) Teen-age pregnancy rates are higher today than they were in the 1940s and ’50s.
5.) Most drug users in the United States are minorities.
6.) Most divorced fathers are “dead-beat dads” who don’t pay child support.
(Answers are below.)

Today, much more than in 1938, we Americans learn about the world and about each other and about what matters most to us not from real people, but from the images and impressions we absorb from our mass media diets. This is not to condemn the media or technology, but it is a fact of life in the information age.

Far from being savvier and more discerning in our use of information that comes to us from television and the Internet and newspapers and radio, we are increasingly likely to take such “knowledge” at face value. And—like oxygen from the air or vitamins from our diets—this “knowledge” is absorbed into our lives, and may warp our attitudes and skew how we see the world without our knowing it.

When Orson Welles and his radio actors dressed up in sheets and yelled “Boo!” for Halloween in 1938, the impact was much greater than anyone expected. In many ways, today's audiences aren’t much better informed than they were then, but the larger social consequences of such blind acceptance today may be much greater than the mere invasion of bloodthirsty Martians.

(Oh, the quiz answers: All items are false.)

This column appeared in the Logan (Utah) Herald-Journal, Nov. 10, 1996.