Word: radioed
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...nontraditional media have also controlled the tone of the debate. The blogosphere joined talk radio as a driver of issues and stories. McCain faced some of his toughest interviews of the campaign on David Letterman and The View. And while Katie Couric grilled Palin on CBS, it was Tina Fey's impression that seared the moment into the national consciousness. (Palin impersonations were also among the hottest genres on YouTube.) The Daily Show was, as in 2000 and 2004, the election's dominant running commentary...
Silence. Dead silence. This is bad. What's going on? Have Martians invaded Earth? Can't be, right? But it's on the radio, and the radio doesn't lie. Is that smoke I smell? Why is old lady Johnson screaming next door? Holy hell...
Similar scenes were repeated all over the East Coast. Listeners poured into the streets. Some headed to church. Others headed to spend their last hours on Earth with family. Wet towels served as makeshift gas masks to protect against the poison gas the radio said was headed outward from New Jersey. Many were convinced it was the end of the world...
...director and star Orson Welles laughed it off as silly and dull. Eventually, the idea surfaced to update the 1898 H.G. Wells story and split it into two. The first part would take the form of a series of musical pieces broken up by increasingly urgent news bulletins. No radio play before had toyed with the form like this, and the bulletins - at this point old hat to Americans familiar with the dire updates coming out of Europe - gave the story a sense of verisimilitude that it otherwise would have lacked. Listeners who came in late missed the opening announcement...
...radio play itself became a textbook example of mass hysteria: in 1940, Princeton psychologist Hadley Cantril used an analysis of listeners' reactions to posit that social panics occur when large groups can't discern reliable sources of advice from unreliable ones. That said, there's little chance that a media hoax of this magnitude could happen again. We've grown too sophisticated, too cynical to believe that little green men from Mars with big silver spaceships will land in New Jersey, of all places. We're too smart, for example, to be fooled by telephone calls suggesting that John McCain...