The Two-Step Flow Theory & the “War of the Worlds”
On the night of October 30th, 1938, Orson Welles’ radio adaptation of “War of the Worlds” went on the air and changed the way people looked at the media forever. The story unfolded within one hour with a bundle of interrupted news bulletins and interviews about aliens attacking the Earth. Throughout the broadcast, influential people like reporters or professors were “killed off”, which created mass panic to everyone who tuned into the station that night. This creative, effective way of using trustful figures throughout the broadcast is called the two-step flow theory, a way of going through influential people to get to mass audiences. Because Welles used this approach correctly, he not only made his broadcast terrifying for the audience to listen to but also made his story extremely believable.
Welles’ adaptation started out like any other broadcast in the 1930s: dance music was playing, and moods were high. However, news bulletins started to come through stating that there were reported explosions on Mars. Because of this rare event, the station decided to send Carl Phillips, a reporter, to interview Professor Pierson of Princeton about the explosions. During this interview, Pierson received a message from a colleague asking him to investigate a huge shock near Princeton, New Jersey. After a break of music, the audience is at the scene of a crash of an unknown object in Grovers Mill, New Jersey. After a few minutes at the scene, something began to move from inside the object. Phillips expressed that it “was the most terrifying thing he has ever seen”. He then left to move to a new position and when he came back the audience heard this:
This was just the beginning of the fear Welles and his team instilled into the people. The broadcast continued by a militia battle with the aliens, the Secretary of the Interior addressing the United States, the Army being killed by the aliens’ poisonous smoke, and a reporter being killed by the smoke after telling people to evacuate. The broadcast then ends soon after Pierson’s long monologue.
Throughout the broadcast, multiple media effects are introduced, but the one that should be focused on is the two-step flow theory. This theory is an approach of going through influential figures to “sell” a product to a mass audience. Two-step flow is used in the media more often than people would like to believe. We see it almost every day whether we are watching a commercial with a famous celebrity or if we are scrolling through YouTube seeing multiple influencers reviewing the same makeup product. For example:
The man in the video states that two-step flow needs an influencer, a product, and an audience. In his example, he uses YouTube star, Zoella, as the influencer and a foundation as the product. Being that she has a higher subscriber count, she has more of a chance at grabbing the audience’s attention about the recent product, making immediate sales. This is a great example of two-step flow being successful.
For Welles’ “War of the Worlds”, the influencers are reporters, anchors, a professor, the Secretary of the Interior, etcetera that are “selling” the product of fear. Fear of what? The obvious fear in the broadcast is the aliens invading Earth and attacking us. Welles sold this idea being using the two-step flow theory. Throughout the broadcast, he would introduce the audience to a trustworthy figure like Phillips the reporter, for example, and he would sell the audience the story of the attacks. As if that was not enough though, Welles had Phillips killed on the air, increasing the chance of “selling” that fear.
Of course, hearing anyone die would be traumatic to hear, but the fact that Welles used the news, a place where back then people expected to find truth and safety in, was a great way to sell his “product” even more. In RadioLab’s “War of the Worlds” podcast, the podcasters state that “people go to the news to be afraid and then to be reassured”. The only thing Welles left the audience was to be afraid. He never had the influential figures in the broadcast reassure the audience. They were observing and reporting on the events happening and they were never able to reassure the audience because they were killed on the air. This action created mass panic to everyone that was listening to “War of the Worlds”.
Listen to 56:18 to 56:44.
However, if we dig deeper, we can see that Welles also wanted to “sell” the fear of the radio or media in general. In 1955, Orson Welles revealed that he was “fed up with…radio being swallowed. Our broadcast was an assault on the credibility of that machine. We wanted people to understand that they should not swallow everything that came out of the tap” (RadioLab). This quote from Welles relates to an area of media that we know all too well today: fake news. In Chen’s “The Fake News Fallacy”, he states that researchers believe that people did not even freak out as much as others believe, the newspapers just sold the idea that hundreds of people panicked to “better control the upstart medium of radio, which was becoming the dominant source of breaking news”. Being that people heard about these small pockets of fear throughout the neighborhood, people began to say they actually saw smoke from the fight over the horizon and crazy lights from afar. These events could not be possible though because Welles story never happened. Just like people in the 1930s, we cannot help but believe or listen to fake news that are told to us through media platforms.
In conclusion, October 30th, 1938, is a date that media followers will never forget. “War of the Worlds” was a successful lesson of how people believe the media and being that this broadcast was done multiple times over the course of a few decades, this broadcast just continually proves that people can continue selling this invasion story through the two-step flow theory. Welles changed the way we view media as a whole and we can see that through the evidence of the broadcast, RadioLab’s podcast, and Chen’s article.
