Analysis Of Orson Welles 1938 War Of The World's Broadcast

Heyer, P. (2003). America under attack I: a reassessment of Orson Welles’ 1938 war of the worlds broadcast. Canadian Journal of Communication, 28(2), 149–165. Heyer’s purpose is give a biographical account of Orson Welles radio experience and a detailed account of his 1938 War of the World’s broadcast, including the media aftermath. In the article, Heyer covers a bit of Welles’ history before his 1938 broadcast, Orson Welles’ unique ability of media awareness, and gives a detailed account of the War of the World’s broadcast. He also explores the affects it had on the public in the days to follow, including journalists, the public, and HG Welles himself. The importance of this article is that it demonstrates that Welles’ charisma on air, natural

Instead, the author contends that the rumors of mass hysteria were perpetrated by newspapers through yellow journalism in want of advertising dollars, and an unprofessional report that used a contested survey method to find out how many listeners heard the broadcast. The article details a PBS program created for the 75th anniversary of the War of the Word’s broadcast, and then breaks the PBS program down to refute various details and facts presented in the show, including how many people were listening, how the myth was popularized, and the effect it had on the public. Using reports made by the CBS executive Frank Stanton, explains amount of people listening to program was in fact nominal, and the few that listened only believed it was a prank; the myth arose from jealous newspaper companies, who set out to vilify the show in an attempt to regain advertising dollars that were being lost to radio, and the myth would have faded away without a report by a respected scholar validating the reports. This article is important because it presents an opposing view from the others and portrays how the media affects the greater opinion of the public. It 's from a current events magazine, but the authors are both scholarly and have wrote a book about the subject so I will use

The purpose of this study is to explore which type of news story is most often reported by local news stations. The study replicates a study from 1979 to determine whether or not local news station favor sensationalist stories and human interest stories vesus public affairs. The researcher studied the same 10 news broadcasting stations as in the original study, at the same time of year to see whether or not statistics had changed within the makeup of the broadcast. The researcher looked at both early evening news coverage and late night coverage, as well as the amount of time given to each type of story. The researcher found that sensationalism had actually rose from 1979, and that the amount of lead stories that were sensationalistic rose from 25% in 1979 to 90% in 1994. The researcher discovered that not only had sensationalism risen, but that it was being inserted in new forms, being subtly inserted into public affair stories as opposed to following sensationalistic and human interest stories outright. This is important because it shows a correlation between the sensationalist media of the 1930’s and depicts the news natural propensity to exaggerate, lending credence to the position of the fake news stories. I will use it in my