

The Real Story of the Panic Over 'War of the Worlds' - ksvs
http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=fwn6zpjwm6trlsgy8kjcr6lxrhxffm1w

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mynameishere
Of course, for months and months after 9/11 you really heard about little else
on the news, and it was understood that everyone was in a dizzy panic over
terrorism. In fact, I've never met anybody worried about terrorism, and even
directly after 9/11, almost no one had much to say about it.

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decode
Summary of the article:

Premise - The media created a near universally-held belief that people went
crazy over "The War of the Worlds". Conclusion - The media don't really affect
us that much.

Here's another entertaining look at three different radio broadcasts of "The
War of the Worlds" and its influence on "The Blair Witch Project":

<http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2008/03/07>

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rationalbeaver
It seems to me that the group most heavily influenced by the media is actually
the media itself.

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daveambrose
Fantastic read. Thanks for sharing. My favorite paragraphs:

"That is the ultimate irony behind "The War of the Worlds." The discovery that
the media are not all-powerful, that they cannot dominate our political
consciousness or even our consumer behavior as much as we suppose, was an
important one. It may seem like a counterintuitive discovery (especially
considering its provenance), but ask yourself this: If we really know how to
control people through the media, then why isn't every advertising campaign a
success? Why do advertisements sometimes backfire? If persuasive technique can
be scientifically devised, then why do political campaigns pursue different
strategies? Why does the candidate with the most media access sometimes lose?

The answer is that humans are not automatons. We might scare easily, we might,
at different times and in different places, be susceptible to persuasion, but
our behavior remains structured by a complex and dynamic series of interacting
factors."

