Radio gaga

MONDAY, JUNE 22 — There have been reams written about Orson Welles’ infamous 1938 “The War of the Worlds” radio broadcast, but much of it has only repeated long-held myths surrounding the broadcast of the fictional alien invasion of Earth.

On Halloween 1938 — that should have been a hint —Welles’ “The Mercury Theatre on the Air” aired a 40-minute, uninterrupted program describing an alien invasion of New Jersey based on H.G. Wells’ classic 1898 novel, “The War of the Worlds.”

The program was done in the style of a live newscast. Even though announcements stating it was fictional ran four times, many listeners had tuned in late — turning from the more popular “The Chase and Sanborn Hour” — or just weren’t paying very close attention to the drama.

East Lansing resident A. Brad Schwartz, using previously unexamined records, has put together the most complete account of that pop-culture event in his book, “Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News.”

One popular myth that Schwartz dispels is that Welles had purposely set the most dramatic moments of the broadcast during an interlude in “The Chase and Sanborn Hour,” thereby ensuring listeners would miss the first announcement. Schwartz’s close examination shows that was not true.

Following the radio show, the media — especially newspapers — ran reports of mass hysteria, with stories about highways jammed by cars and listeners were donning gas masks and taking other outrageous actions.

Although there were scattered instances of this hysteria, Schwartz writes, the only real drama was in the radio studio, where police showed up to try to end the broadcast. Later analysis showed little evidence of mass hysteria.

The only hysteria, Schwartz said, occurred was with the media. He uses that point to pivot into a discussion of the “fake” news the public barraged with today.

Schwartz, 25, is a graduate of Okemos High School and the University of Michigan. He learned about Orson Welles at a young age, he said, when his mother would play tapes of radio broadcasts for him to help him go to sleep.

His mother, an educator, believed that listening to the spoken word recordings would help Schwartz’s verbal skills. He recalls falling to sleep listening to old-time radio shows like “The Shadow,” one of Welles’ stellar radio performances.

“I already knew about Welles,” Schwartz said, explaining that his book began as a senior thesis at the University of Michigan. The book is a tightly written, concise and fun look at a time when the radio industry was flexing its muscle and was committed to creative programming.

Coincidence played a part in the writing of the book, when as a sophomore Schwartz heard a guest lecturer extolling the University of Michigan’s recent acquisition of some Orson Welles’ papers.

He learned that the collection held a trove letters from 1,400 individuals who had written to the station about the show. Schwartz would later compare those letters with some 600 letters that had been sent to the Federal Communications Commission about the broadcast.

The epistolary look at that night’s program provides a completely different viewpoint from what was presented in the media. The vast majority of the letters were congratulatory in nature.

“When I needed a topic for a senior thesis, it was there,” Schwartz said. “And I thought that there was probably a book in there. I had always envisioned it as a book.”

Schwartz, who graduated with a double major in film and history, wrote a movie script while in college. The script got some notice in Hollywood and connected him to an agent for his book.

Once the deal was cut, Schwartz began a sprint to the finish. He had six months to complete a draft in order to meet a production schedule which would see the book out in time for the 100th anniversary of the birth of Orson Welles in 2015.

In his book, Schwartz dissects the blowback from the airing of the controversial segment. Activists and politicians across the country, fueled by claims of hysteria, demanded the Federal Communications Commission look into banning such content.

“There was a fear of what radio could do to American democracy,” Schwartz writes.

It’s a perennial belief, Schwartz said, that the introduction of new media will send people into a life of crime or harm children in some way.

“I hope the book will put the next moral panic in perspective,” he said.

Even in what is called the “golden age of radio,” Schwartz said, there was a mixture of journalism and entertainment. Welles’ use of the broadcast technique wasn’t even original. “March of Time,” another program that Welles was an integral part of, had used the conceit of recreating history through fake news broadcasts.

In fact, Schwartz points out in his book, British radio had used almost the exact technique in the 1920s in “Broadcasting the Barricades,” a tongue-in-cheek recreation of a British insurrection. Michigan’s own Sen. Arthur Vandenberg also used the technique in his aborted production of “A Fireside Mystery Chat,” which was designed to counter Roosevelt’s masterful use of radio.

Schwartz believes the parallels between then and now are amazing, and the dangers of confusing entertainment and news are still with us.

“Part of the book was always me working out my frustrations with where media is now,” he said.

He said he was fortunate that he examined the Welles’ archives when he did. The university has since received several significant additions to the collection, and many more people are looking at it and writing about it.