.
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.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Column: Watching Media
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Watching Media
By Edward C. Pease
©1994
A recent headline in the Logan Herald-Journal announced, “Man tries to bite police dog.”
It was an eye-catcher for anyone idly page-surfing through the second section. But the average Utah newspaper reader may not recognize that headline as a recurring inside joke for journalists, part of press history, lore and tradition.
Back in 1918, John Bogart, a city editor for the New York Sun, helped American journalism define what’s news: “When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often,” Bogart wrote. “But if a man bites a dog, that is news.” With this concept of the kind of news that Americans most want—the “Gee whiz!” stories, the bizarre, the horrifying, the heart-wrenching—sensationalism as a way to sell news was born.
As any newspaper reader or TV viewer knows, the man-bites-dog standard has helped define what journalism has become.
Just watch “reality-based” TV programming. “Hard Copy,” “Inside Edition,” “Cops,” “911” and many other TV tabloids report breathlessly about questionable (sometimes re-staged) events, misguided personalities and real-time crimes, catastrophes and arrests.
To say nothing of the daytime soap operas and primetime sitcoms—“General Hospital,” “Fresh Prince,” “As the World Turns,” “Melrose Place” and the rest—which help Americans form an understanding of how relationships and families work according to entertainment media’s cockeyed view of the world.
On radio and television, talk shows—from “Oprah” to “Rush Limbaugh” and “Larry King Live”—are the hottest thing around, and often the hottest thing over lunch or at the dining room table, too. Talk shows have replaced conversations we used to have in person—on porches, in diners and barber shops, over backyard fences with friends and neighbors. Nowadays, talk shows are the new “electronic backyard fence” over which we Americans get together to talk about what’s new, where we form our views of the world.
From the interminable O.J. Simpson trial to the latest plane crash, from election campaigns to White House missteps, from the continuing agony in the Middle East to race relations in this country—the news media help set the agenda of what we think about.
Entertainment media also reflect society and help form how we, our children, families, friends and neighbors see the world and each other. When 17-year-old Nathan Martinez of Salt Lake was arrested for the murders of his stepmother and sister, authorities (and the media) said his crime was inspired by his 20-plus viewings of the movie “Natural Born Killers.”
It’s an old story—“The media made me do it.” Back in 1938, at Halloween, Orson Welles pulled the greatest media prank of all time when his actors performed “War of the Worlds” on radio, convincing millions of listeners that Martians had invaded New Jersey. We laugh today, but how about this from the Associated Press: “The CBS movie ‘Without Warning,’ about an asteroid striking Earth, triggered hundreds of phone calls nationwide Sunday night from confused viewers concerned that the depicted disaster might be true.” That story appeared Oct. 31, 1994.
It’s a strange place, the “real world”-according-to-the media.
With this column, the Standard Examiner inaugurates a regular feature that will critically examine how the news and entertainment media work, and how they perform in our lives in Utah and beyond. “The media” means not just newspapers (including this one), but also TV, radio, advertising, magazines—even books, records and CDs, and the much-ballyhooed “information superhighway.”
The idea is to take an up-close and skeptical look at the media that flood our lives and homes, from the morning paper and “Good Morning America” to radio shows we hear on the way to work to the evening situation comedies and latest Hollywood releases. These help set the agendas of our lives, our culture and our society, so they’re worth examining as they come into our homes.
We’ll discuss—with the help of you readers, our community partners and neighbors—not just what Americans like and dislike about media content, but how it all works, dispelling some myths about the press and examining what researchers have learned about how Americans use the media, and vice versa.
Responsible citizens in what truly is becoming an Information Age should know how it all works. We all must be skeptical and knowledgeable consumers of news and entertainment in the brave new electronic world, where the media are the “backyard fence” over which we discuss with friends and neighbors the day’s events.
(Postscript: This column appeared in 1994 in the Ogden (Utah) Standard-Examiner. It was my first and last “regular” column in the Standard, as the editorial page editor convinced the publisher the next day that it was a bad idea for a newspaper to run columns criticizing the press. So it goes.)
Watching Media
By Edward C. Pease
©1994
A recent headline in the Logan Herald-Journal announced, “Man tries to bite police dog.”
It was an eye-catcher for anyone idly page-surfing through the second section. But the average Utah newspaper reader may not recognize that headline as a recurring inside joke for journalists, part of press history, lore and tradition.
Back in 1918, John Bogart, a city editor for the New York Sun, helped American journalism define what’s news: “When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often,” Bogart wrote. “But if a man bites a dog, that is news.” With this concept of the kind of news that Americans most want—the “Gee whiz!” stories, the bizarre, the horrifying, the heart-wrenching—sensationalism as a way to sell news was born.
As any newspaper reader or TV viewer knows, the man-bites-dog standard has helped define what journalism has become.
Just watch “reality-based” TV programming. “Hard Copy,” “Inside Edition,” “Cops,” “911” and many other TV tabloids report breathlessly about questionable (sometimes re-staged) events, misguided personalities and real-time crimes, catastrophes and arrests.
To say nothing of the daytime soap operas and primetime sitcoms—“General Hospital,” “Fresh Prince,” “As the World Turns,” “Melrose Place” and the rest—which help Americans form an understanding of how relationships and families work according to entertainment media’s cockeyed view of the world.
On radio and television, talk shows—from “Oprah” to “Rush Limbaugh” and “Larry King Live”—are the hottest thing around, and often the hottest thing over lunch or at the dining room table, too. Talk shows have replaced conversations we used to have in person—on porches, in diners and barber shops, over backyard fences with friends and neighbors. Nowadays, talk shows are the new “electronic backyard fence” over which we Americans get together to talk about what’s new, where we form our views of the world.
From the interminable O.J. Simpson trial to the latest plane crash, from election campaigns to White House missteps, from the continuing agony in the Middle East to race relations in this country—the news media help set the agenda of what we think about.
Entertainment media also reflect society and help form how we, our children, families, friends and neighbors see the world and each other. When 17-year-old Nathan Martinez of Salt Lake was arrested for the murders of his stepmother and sister, authorities (and the media) said his crime was inspired by his 20-plus viewings of the movie “Natural Born Killers.”
It’s an old story—“The media made me do it.” Back in 1938, at Halloween, Orson Welles pulled the greatest media prank of all time when his actors performed “War of the Worlds” on radio, convincing millions of listeners that Martians had invaded New Jersey. We laugh today, but how about this from the Associated Press: “The CBS movie ‘Without Warning,’ about an asteroid striking Earth, triggered hundreds of phone calls nationwide Sunday night from confused viewers concerned that the depicted disaster might be true.” That story appeared Oct. 31, 1994.
It’s a strange place, the “real world”-according-to-the media.
With this column, the Standard Examiner inaugurates a regular feature that will critically examine how the news and entertainment media work, and how they perform in our lives in Utah and beyond. “The media” means not just newspapers (including this one), but also TV, radio, advertising, magazines—even books, records and CDs, and the much-ballyhooed “information superhighway.”
The idea is to take an up-close and skeptical look at the media that flood our lives and homes, from the morning paper and “Good Morning America” to radio shows we hear on the way to work to the evening situation comedies and latest Hollywood releases. These help set the agendas of our lives, our culture and our society, so they’re worth examining as they come into our homes.
We’ll discuss—with the help of you readers, our community partners and neighbors—not just what Americans like and dislike about media content, but how it all works, dispelling some myths about the press and examining what researchers have learned about how Americans use the media, and vice versa.
Responsible citizens in what truly is becoming an Information Age should know how it all works. We all must be skeptical and knowledgeable consumers of news and entertainment in the brave new electronic world, where the media are the “backyard fence” over which we discuss with friends and neighbors the day’s events.
(Postscript: This column appeared in 1994 in the Ogden (Utah) Standard-Examiner. It was my first and last “regular” column in the Standard, as the editorial page editor convinced the publisher the next day that it was a bad idea for a newspaper to run columns criticizing the press. So it goes.)
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