ECHOES OF “WAR OF THE WORLDS”
As the Capitol was desecrated yesterday, I found myself thinking of Orson Welle’s 1938 “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast. Although reports of mass hysteria in reaction to the broadcast were apparently exaggerated, it is verified that many people thought that what they were hearing was real, and reacted in terror to the prospect of a Martian invasion, just as the traitors in the Capitol yesterday were motivated by a mass delusion propagated in our far more technologically advanced media.
Radio was a relatively new technology then, just as the internet is now. The first commercial radio station dated from 1920, just 18 years before “War of the Worlds”, and this no doubt added to its power, and the inability of its audience to evaluate it critically. In my hometown of Detroit, a viciously racist and anti Semitic Catholic priest with Nazi sympathies named Father Caughlin had an enormously popular weekly radio show in the 1930s; his audience has been estimated at 30,000,000 each week.
Now we have preposterous fantasies, such as a stolen election, being presented as fact and disseminated on the internet, and our fellow citizens are if anything even worse today at evaluating the veracity of what they read and watch than Americans more than 80 years ago were at sifting truth from fantasy from their radio programs.
The internet is perhaps in a stage of development comparable to that of the automobile in its first 20 years of widespread use. There were no seat belts or shoulder harnesses, no padded dashboards or shatterproof glass. It took a while for somebody to come up with the idea of stop signs, let alone traffic lights, and effective drunk driving laws — with breathalyzer tests to give them real teeth — came decades later. Inevitably, this resulted in mayhem; the toll of deaths and injuries per passenger mile dwarfed our current carnage, although cell phones are closing the gap.
I am no Marxist. I understand that the profit motive is a very powerful tool in creating an economy that can give us a comfortable standard of living, and we saw the squalor that eliminating it created in the Soviet Union. But we don’t use the for-profit model in everything — our fire departments are not private corporations. The model does not seem to be working at all well in health care, and I would argue that it has serious drawbacks in providing a democracy with the news and information that it needs to function effectively.
Fox News and its even more rabid competitors such as Newsmax and Breitbart gin up outrage with misinformation, and reap extraordinary profits from it. They grow rich from destroying minds just as surely as did the Sackler family with their opiates. There are obvious dangers in making news and information sources a public utility; one need only look to Pravda and Izvestia. But I think we have to come up with some sort of public/private partnership to ensure that the stories that motivate our politics are not outright fiction.
