Rob Brotherton - Bad News: Why We Fall for Fake News and Alternative Facts

Also available in the Bloomsbury Sigma series:

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For Mum and Dad

Contents

Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News.

The announcer spoke quickly, but there was no cause for panic. Not yet.

At twenty minutes before eight, central time, Professor Farrell of the Mount Jennings Observatory, Chicago, Illinois, reports observing several explosions of incandescent gas, occurring at regular intervals on the planet Mars.

It was a few minutes after 8:00 p.m. on Sunday, October 30, 1938. The night before Halloween.

The spectroscope indicates the gas to be hydrogen and moving towards the earth with enormous velocity. A Princeton University professor is quoted describing the phenomenon, ominously, as like a jet of blue flame shot from a gun.

Then the news flash ended, and normality resumed: We now return you to the music of Ramn Raquello, playing for you in the Meridian Room of the Park Plaza Hotel.

But this was not really a music program, and the news flash was not really news. This was Orson Welless radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds , the most infamous fake news story of all time.

The musical respite is brief. An announcer again interrupts to throw to a hastily arranged interview with Professor Pierson, the Princeton astronomer quoted in the initial news flash. Ostensibly broadcasting live from Princetons observatory, the ticking clockwork of the observatorys huge telescope is audible in the background. In fact, Welles and his Mercury Theatre on the Air company were broadcasting from a studio in midtown Manhattan. The ticking was just one of many special effects that would be used throughout the show to enhance the illusion of chaotic events unfolding live and unplanned.

As Pierson surveys the surface of the Red Planet through the telescope, the interviewer voices the concern that may by now have been lurking in the back of some listeners minds: Youre quite convinced, as a scientist, that living intelligence as we know it does not exist on Mars?

The professor sounds terse but unconcerned. Embodying scientific hubris, he delivers the famous reply: I should say the chances against it are a thousand to one. Careful listeners would have noticed that the professors sonorous voice was actually that of Welles himself.

It transpires that some extraterrestrial object has, in fact, crashed to Earth just twenty miles from Princeton. Events escalate quickly, and all the while the pretense is kept up of live coverage of confusing and ultimately catastrophic events unfolding on the East Coast of America at that very moment.

The interviewer rushes to the crash site, with Pierson in tow, where police and hundreds of onlookers observe a crashed alien craft of some kind. A few of the gawkers are roped into impromptu interviews. The actors, in character as bewildered bystanders, deliberately stumble over words, repeat themselves, and forget to speak into the microphone. The confusion is palpable.

Before long, a tentacled alien emerges from the spacecraft. Good heavens, somethings wriggling out of the shadow like a gray snake, the interviewer says, the professional restraint in his voice giving way to panic. Suddenly, the alien is incinerating everything around it. Now the whole fields caught fire, the interviewer practically screams. We hear an explosion. Its coming this way. About twenty yards to my right The transmission cuts out.

After a short but excruciating silence, an announcer blithely explains, Evidently theres some difficulty with our field transmission. The network cuts to a calm piano interlude, only adding to the horror. We soon learn that the interviewer has been incinerated, along with dozens of bystanders, by the alien, their bodies burned and distorted beyond all possible recognition.

Moments later, the commander of the New Jersey state militia is explaining that, on the orders of the governor of New Jersey, martial law has been imposed and evacuations are beginning in the area. The broadcast facilities have been handed over to the state militia. A Captain Lansing of the signal corps informs listeners that the situation is now under complete control with eight battalions of infantry closing in on an old metal tube.

This is more hubris.

Ladies and gentlemen, the announcer breaks in yet again, I have a grave announcement to make. The militia has been wiped out. The announcer gives a gruesome accounting of the carnage. Seven thousand men armed with rifles and machine guns pitted against a single fighting machine of the invaders from Mars. One hundred and twenty known survivors. The rest strewn over the battle area from Grovers Mill to Plainsboro, crushed and trampled to death under the metal feet of the monster or burned to cinders by its heat ray.

The reality of the situation is now inescapable. Incredible as it may seem, both the observations of science and the evidence of our eyes lead to the inescapable assumption that those strange beings who landed in the Jersey farmlands tonight are the vanguard of an invading army from the planet Mars. The Martian is on the move, trampling or incinerating everything in its path, deliberately tearing up railroad tracks and bringing down telephone lines. Even as a statement from the secretary of the interior urges calm, a second Martian craft is discovered and listeners are told of more spacecraft launching from Mars, presumably as reinforcements. Poisonous black smoke is now blanketing the countryside. New York City is being evacuated. Soon the Martians are crossing the Hudson River and all of Manhattan is being enveloped in deadly smoke.

The announcer who has been keeping us abreast of the developments from the safe confines of the news studio tells us he is now on the roof of the broadcasting building, looking down upon the chaos on New York Citys streets as poisonous smoke engulfs the city. The smokes crossing Sixth Avenue Fifth Avenue one hundred yards away its fifty feet