4 ms·

Meh, it's a question of scale. In the 1980s, there was a TV program on in the US (I think it was Countdown to Looking Glass) which depicted what a hypothetical

Meh, it's a question of scale. In the 1980s, there was a TV program on in the US (I think it was Countdown to Looking Glass) which depicted what a hypothetical escalation between the US and USSR might have looked like, culminating in a nuclear exchange. It was complete with actors as news anchors, Newt Gingrich apparently played himself (don't remember that part), etc. My poor grandmother, who was staying with us for a few days, started watching in the middle of it, unaware that it was fiction. A little later she walked grimly into my room to announce that we'd just traded nukes with the Soviets in the Middle East. So, yeah, I'm sure a number of people were fooled by War of the Worlds and its descendants. Whether it rose quite to the legend doesn't strike me as a particularly interesting question.

PhasmaFelis 13y ago
Really? You don't see a notable distinction between "over a million people panicked by fictional news" and "one grandma panicked by fictional news"?
- Scramblejams 13y ago
  That's not the distinction drawn by the article. The problem with this article, which isn't completely the fault of the authors, is that it's unsatisfying. They're saying, "Hey, we have a strong case here that it wasn't anything like a million people," but then they don't go lay it on the line and make a firm case for it having panicked X people. And that's probably the best they can do, given the lack of historical data, but it's not enough to deliver the kind of hard-hitting, conclusive punchline that's frequently necessary to kill off widespread myths. (Assuming, of course, that they really are myths. Some historical facts derided as myths have come back to haunt their doubters.)
huxley 13y ago
I don't remember hearing about "Countdown to Looking Glass", but the TV movie I remember causing a lot of public reaction was "The Day After": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After

PhasmaFelis 13y ago

Really? You don't see a notable distinction between "over a million people panicked by fictional news" and "one grandma panicked by fictional news"?

Scramblejams 13y ago
That's not the distinction drawn by the article. The problem with this article, which isn't completely the fault of the authors, is that it's unsatisfying. They're saying, "Hey, we have a strong case here that it wasn't anything like a million people," but then they don't go lay it on the line and make a firm case for it having panicked X people. And that's probably the best they can do, given the lack of historical data, but it's not enough to deliver the kind of hard-hitting, conclusive punchline that's frequently necessary to kill off widespread myths. (Assuming, of course, that they really are myths. Some historical facts derided as myths have come back to haunt their doubters.)

huxley 13y ago

I don't remember hearing about "Countdown to Looking Glass", but the TV movie I remember causing a lot of public reaction was "The Day After": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After