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You just made me think of the War of the Worlds radio show from 1938[1]. This feels very similar and the article touches on that too: The radio was the one trus

• drewcoo 3y ago
  In which day were newspapers considered trustworthy? _My_ newspapers were trustworthy but _theirs_ were not, just like today. Here in America, very vitriolic, libelous, openly lawless newspapers helped lead to the US Revolution. We have much laxer laws about quality and stronger protections for the press than Britain as a result. We have a tradition of encouraging lies and counter-lies to be published. The War of the Worlds seemed real to some people because it used the typical means of interrupting the show for breaking emergency news that people were used to at the time. It's not that radio was trusted. Some people were fooled. There's no real evidence of a national panic as a result, though. There were a great number of highly questionable newspaper articles claiming there was a panic, though, as papers will.
  • 1letterunixname 3y ago
    The reputations of journalists and newspapers and predominant trust in authorities are the main discriminators that have varied over time (in America, for context). Comparing and contrasting generalities about then and now that don't hold for every situation: It was easier to fool people then because they were more trusting, e.g., didn't lock their front door. It was harder to fool people generally as critical thinking skills were better developed and there were fewer concepts to think about. People also tended to exercise greater self-control then than now. It was easier to fool people in the past because information about the current state of the world and details held by authorities weren't as freely available. It's easier to fool larger numbers of laypeople today who are generally less informed and less educated than in the past. (Even manual laborers were once schooled in Latin at the turn of the century. Geography and basic facts about the world were well known.) It is harder to fool people now more consistently because of instant communication to almost anyone else. It is easier to fool people now because community and social ties tend to be weaker than they were. It's easier to fool people now because information maybe freely available but it's not interesting enough to, or studied by, many people. ----- Fiction needs suspension of disbelief. If the pretext seems too outlandish, then it is received as ludicrous or dismissed as wild science fiction. OTOH, if that belief seems plausible and plays into taboos or phobias, then it disturbs the comfortable. Furthermore, humor and fiction both need tells to set themselves apart from serious presentations, perhaps a ancestor of Poe's law. (The "tell" should've been that it occurred on Halloween night, while an anti-tell was the lack of commercial interruption.) I vote for "Welle's law" when spoken word is involved. ----- - WRH arguably caused the Spanish-American war. - The Gulf of Tonkin incident probably didn't happen, but red-baiting and proxy war ambitions led the military-political-industrial complex to present a mostly fabricated story as the pretext to invading Vietnam. - Few journalists spoke out against the second invasion Iraq, a plan hatched by Cheney for profit, especially about the WMDs that couldn't be found. - Not many journalists objected to RT America or Sputnik and used them as their mass media public square forums. It was transparent to anyone halfwitted because these networks would have their own Kremlin plants who would speak outlandishly like a conspiracy theorist drunk uncle every family seems to have. I'm concerned about news organizations of all slants where anchors see themselves as character actors and influencers first who drive a reality with them in front than Walter Cronkites, detectives, fact checkers, or writers who report important information, wherever it leads. The "winning" of a particular faction cannot be had by the dissolution of society and the isolation in anechoic chambers free from tough questions and reinforcement of that particular dogmatic orthodoxy. This way has tended to lead to culture wars that spill over into sectarian violence.