For context, the Mercury Theatre on the Air site has a full recording of Orson Welles's staging of The War of the Worlds available at [1][mp3]. It doesn't sound to me like the cast were trying to make it particularly realistic. Commercial radio broadcasting was still relatively novel in 1938, but its hard to understand now how anyone thought it was real.
The site [2] also has a brief recording of a conversation [3][mp3] between Orson Welles and H. G. Wells (which I haven't listened to). I hadn't realised that their adult lives overlapped.
The explanation I read was that this show was not very popular, at least at the time. Most people were listening to another station. Then, when it went to commercial, they switched to Mercury Theatre. This means they missed Orson's introduction, which says explicitly that it is just a drama. So the first thing they heard was the series of fake news flashes.
I caught this on the radio this weekend, and couldn't stop listening. It included a story about a radio station re-doing War of the Worlds in Quito, Ecuador, only they really tried to fool people. I don't want to give away the result, but it's worth a listen. The Slate article doesn't mention it.
>The legend of the panic, however, grew exponentially over the following years. In 1940, an esteemed academic solidified the myth in the public mind. Relying heavily on a skewed report compiled six weeks after the broadcast by the American Institute of Public Opinion
American Institute of Public Opinion, huh? Considering this is the artist who brought us Citizen Kane, I suspect a submarine job:
> The American Institute of Public Opinion was founded by Dr. George Gallup in 1935. The stated purpose of this organization was "impartially to measure and report public opinion on political and social issues of the day without regard to the rightness or wisdom of the views expressed."
> The institute conducted "Gallup polls" on a wide variety of issues. The results of these national surveys were then distributed to subscribing newspapers in the form of press releases.
Some years ago I had a native German explain to me that what JFK said really did mean "I'm a jelly donut," and he should have said "Ich bin Berliner." So YMMV.
Yes. And it's nice for a sterile Wikipedia page to offer the idea that there was only one way for JFK to say it, and that he did it correctly.
However! What I supplied was (one anecdote of) the reaction of a native German speaker who heard the line themselves. Their reaction was in line with the supposed myth. So no matter how smugly people today might denounce that as a myth, there were those in the intended audience whose reactions were exactly in line with the supposed myth. Which, of course, makes it not so much of a myth.
Eddie Izzard made the best comparison to help it click: if a resident of Frankfurt were to hear "I am a Frankfurter", it still makes perfect sense, even if it also means "I am a hot dog".
The correct English transliteration would be more like "vienner" which pretty closely follows the common English practice of adding an -er suffix to denote someone's place of origin.
The false claim is that anyone in attendance mistook Kennedy's statement to mean anything other than "I am a person from Berlin." It is equally false to claim that Kennedy misspoke or made a gaffe in this speech. Only later was this double meaning of the word 'Berliner' pointed out by comedians.
The sad part is that there are people who insist that one can hear audience members laughing at that moment in recordings of the speech. Nope, just cheering.
It's still somewhat false though, from that wikipedia link:
> Here is where President Kennedy announced, Ich bin ein Berliner, and thereby amused the city's populace because in the local parlance a Berliner is a doughnut.
and
> What they did not know, but could easily have found out, was that such citizens never refer to themselves as 'Berliners.'
In Berlin itself, a Berliner is actually called "Pfannkuchen", so while it might have amused other Germans, that wouldn't apply to citizens of Berlin themselves, which do in fact call themselves "Berliner".
> While called Berliner (Ballen) in Northern and Western Germany as well as in Switzerland, the Berliners themselves and residents of Brandenburg, Western Pomerania, Saxony-Anhalt and Saxony know them as Pfannkuchen, which in the rest of Germany generally means pancakes; pancakes are known there as Eierkuchen ("egg cakes").
If a few dozen or hundred people were fooled and called in to complain, that would be worth an on-air answer. It's still a long, long way from the "over a million" that was claimed.
In the 1980s, there was a TV program on in the US (I think it was Countdown to Looking Glass) which depicted what a hypothetical escalation between the US and USSR might have looked like, culminating in a nuclear exchange. It was complete with actors as news anchors, Newt Gingrich apparently played himself (don't remember that part), etc.
My poor grandmother, who was staying with us for a few days, started watching in the middle of it, unaware that it was fiction. A little later she walked grimly into my room to announce that we'd just traded nukes with the Soviets in the Middle East.
So, yeah, I'm sure a number of people were fooled by War of the Worlds and its descendants. Whether it rose quite to the legend doesn't strike me as a particularly interesting question.
The problem with this article, which isn't completely the fault of the authors, is that it's unsatisfying. They're saying, "Hey, we have a strong case here that it wasn't anything like a million people," but then they don't go lay it on the line and make a firm case for it having panicked X people. And that's probably the best they can do, given the lack of historical data, but it's not enough to deliver the kind of hard-hitting, conclusive punchline that's frequently necessary to kill off widespread myths. (Assuming, of course, that they really are myths. Some historical facts derided as myths have come back to haunt their doubters.)
You probably can't listen to it unless you are in the UK, but it seems that there were panics, just localised ones. There have also been repeats of this event when similar programs were broadcast in other countries. For instance, see here:
For the Chase and Sandborn Hour, Edgar Bergen was actually just doing multiple voices (being a radio ventriloquist was just a humorous hook). You can hear some episodes here:
Mel Blanc (of Looney Tunes voice acting fame) did much the same thing for the Jack Benny radio shows and also had his own half-hour long radio show, which you can hear here:
I don't think anyone's disagreeing with you, they perhaps just don't like the sarcastic, snarky tone of your otherwise empty comment. Personally, I enjoyed it, but I suspect many in the community would not have.
The site [2] also has a brief recording of a conversation [3][mp3] between Orson Welles and H. G. Wells (which I haven't listened to). I hadn't realised that their adult lives overlapped.
[1] http://sounds.mercurytheatre.info/mercury/381030.mp3
[2] http://www.mercurytheatre.info/
[3] http://sounds.mercurytheatre.info/mercury/401028.mp3