War of the Worlds

After watching this insane documentary, War of the Worlds, it really blows my mind again and again how much of an impact the media has on people. People will literally believe everything they hear without stopping to think calmly and rationally about it first. I honestly did find it kind of funny what Orson Welles did but at the same time it was a little messed up. In the beginning of this documentary the narrator was talking about how basically everything people would hear on the radio was literally all bad news. I think that is interesting because even now in today’s time, all news channels and reporters do is talk about bad news and what’s wrong with the world so its interesting to see that that aspect of the media hasn’t changed in the past 80 or so years. This kind of event where people thought the world was ending has happened several times already, however. There have been soooo many instances where rumors were flying that the world was ending (2k, 2012, etc) which would send people into a panic irrational state which would cause them to do stupid (even life threatening) things. I’m not really surprised that people wanted to file lawsuits against Welles for his radio drama. Part of me feels like he should have warned people beforehand that this was just a radio drama but then again that takes away all of the fun too. I do disagree with all the newspaper articles that were calling the public stupid because to be fair, this was happening during a war and many people thought this was the Germans because they didn’t hear the part about the martian invaders. Science was also not as advanced back then so it could be perfectly plausible to believe that there was life on Mars.This drama sounded so realistic  that I could definitely understand why it caused such a widespread panic. I don’t think its entirely the public’s fault. The funny and kind of sad thing is that I could still see something like this happening in today’s time, after watching this documentary I can see that people haven’t really changed much and heavily rely on the media for all of their information.