At American Thinker, Peggy Ryan opens with a brief account of the alien invasion
of New Jersey:
'War of the Words': A Global Media Production
On Sunday, October 30, 1938, thousands of
radio listeners heard terrifying news: aliens had invaded New Jersey.
From a New York Daily News article,
October 31, 1938:
A radio dramatization of H.G.
Wells' "War of the Worlds" which thousands of people misunderstood as
a news broadcast of a current catastrophe in New Jersey created almost
unbelievable scenes of terror in New York, New Jersey, the South and as far
west as San Francisco between 8 and 9 o'clock last night.
Ridiculous, you say. Why
would people believe that aliens had invaded? They believed because
it was news. Orson Welles's adaptation of the War of the Worlds novel used
familiar, trusted devices to report the fictional attack — news bulletins,
updates from live reporters on the ground. He used actual government
positions like New Jersey governor and secretary of interior and physical
locations like Trenton, Mercer, and Princeton. These positions and
locations were all too familiar to those listening to the "news"
updates — confirmation that the reports were real.
Still, does hearing it on the news
make it any less impossible? Apparently, because thousands were
convinced right up until they switched channels or heard the
retraction. But what would have happened if War of the Worlds had been on every
channel, reported by all news outlets? What if there'd never been a
retraction? Wouldn't millions have believed the impossible?
These lessons were not lost on
power brokers around the world. In the U.S. today, eight
billionaires control our once free press, while their oligarch allies
monopolize social media. Their messages are not only uniform across
all channels, but often repeated word for word. And because it's
every mainstream media channel, because nearly every social media site backs it
up, fake news is the order of the day — fabricated stories, nonexistent
sources, blatant propaganda presented as fact.
So how could these information
power brokers use this imperium? Could the "news," say,
take a story made from whole cloth, total fiction, and make it real, use it to
damage and possibly remove a sitting president? They could, and they
did.
Read the rest here; Ms. Ryan explains how “They could, and they did” – and “they do” pretty much all the time. Ms. Ryan seeks a remedy:
It falls to those who seek truth to
help those who can't "judge" for themselves. We must
expose media as the enemy, be armed with facts from reliable sources, expose
the lies, and reject the illusions. It falls to us to educate
others.
That’s a tall order. Keep trying.
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