These days, we see fake news spread like a virus in an effort to get clicks on the internet. Conspiracy theories and deliberately false stories meant to smear those who irritate the powers-that-be are, in part, what is destroying public trust in the media. In 1938, the goal wasn’t for clicks, of course. Instead, it was for ears. The drama and power of the 1937 Hindenburg report and its impact on the public just one year later inspired a creative team and their production of what could be considered the first broadcast of deliberately fake news.
On October 30, 1938, Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre on the Air broadcast an adaptation of the 1898 H. G. Wells novel The War of the Worlds on the CBS radio network. In the novel, a narrator conveys the story, but for the radio adaptation, Welles decided to present it as breaking news, delivered by a reporter.
The adaptation deliberately copied the style of the Herb Morrison report on the Hindenburg crash to deliver what sounded like a series of urgent breaking news bulletins about a successful Martian invasion of New Jersey taking place as the broadcast aired.
“Sunday evening in 1938 was prime-time in the golden age of radio, and millions of Americans had their radios turned on. But most of these Americans were listening to ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy ‘Charlie McCarthy’ on NBC and only turned to CBS at 8:12 p.m. after the comedy sketch ended and a little-known singer went on,” the History Channel tells us. “By then, the story of the Martian invasion was well underway.”11
On the eightieth anniversary of the broadcast in 2018, in a special for its magazine, Peter Tonguette at the National Endowment for the Humanities wrote:
For much of its duration, the program was presented as a faux newscast. Consequently, Welles, who was then all of twenty-three, had somehow persuaded a portion of the public that Martians were annihilating Earthlings. The New York Times headline painted the picture: “Radio Listeners in Panic, Taking War Drama as Fact.”
So, seated among a semicircle of eagerly scribbling reporters, Welles wore an oh-so-serious expression and spoke in sincere, thoughtful tones. “I know that almost everybody in radio would do almost anything to avert the kind of thing that has happened, myself included,” Welles said. “Radio is new, and we are learning about the effect it has on people. We learned a terrible lesson.”12
Despite some people claiming the audience reaction was overblown and that the radio play would never have been mistaken for a real broadcast, during a 1955 television show, Welles admitted that the hoax and impact wasn’t an accident. “We made a special effort to make our show as realistic as possible,” Welles said in an episode of the BBC television series Orson Welles’ Sketch Book. “That is, we reproduced all the radio effects, not only sound effects. Well, we did on the show exactly what would have happened if the world had been invaded. We had a little music playing and then an announcer coming on and saying, ‘Excuse me, we interrupt this program to bring you an announcement from Jersey City.’”13
Looking back on something like this has allowed the world to consider this an example of classic entertainment, including the fear that surrounded it. But the reaction of panic and terror at the time was genuine and certainly not entertaining. The War of the Worlds broadcast is an early example of how taking advantage of listeners’ trust in a new communications medium could easily be exploited for publicity and attention. It was, as Welles noted the next day, a “terrible lesson.” But perhaps for others, not so terrible an example, as we all know too well today.
“Mostly Peaceful” Riots
A disappointing majority of liberal journalists don’t even try to be objective, despite their claims to the contrary. Like the proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing, they attempt to disguise who they are: partisan Democratic activists embedded in their media platforms. We see the results of their flagrant left-wing bias every day. Welles presented deliberately fake news to his audience. Today we have the same problem, but we also have to guard for lies by omission from the media, and the deliberate gaslighting of the audience.
One of the best examples of gaslighting and propaganda is represented by the remarkably absurd news coverage of the Black Lives Matter and Antifa riots of 2020 that swept across the US (an issue I cover more extensively in our last chapter). In this case, we see every classic element of propaganda, including manipulation, omitting or distorting facts, and lying or misrepresenting something that is on its face completely different from what is being described. One of the goals of gaslighting and cultic brainwashing is to have the targets begin to question what their own senses are telling them. Marxists can only win when they convince us to literally not believe what we see with our own eyes.
Liberal news organizations were fearful of portraying riots following the murder of George Floyd for what they were—lawless rampages involving property damage, injuries, and the loss of life—because they didn’t want to make the left look bad and be accused of racism. In addition, the leftist media sought to normalize violence in the name of “equity.” Telling average Americans that violence is a natural response to leftist grievances and should be expected tells them that their new normal is a Hobbesian state-of-nature, where massive government involvement and a dramatic change of the American system and society is the only answer.
Facilitating that narrative were statements from the organizer of Black Lives Matter in Chicago. After a night of mass looting in the city, the activist insisted to a throng of protesters and media that “‘I don’t care if somebody decides to loot a Gucci or a Macy’s or a Nike because that makes sure that that person eats. That makes sure that that person has clothes,’ [Ariel] Atkins said, according to NBC Chicago. ‘That’s reparations. That is reparations. Anything they want to take, take it because these businesses have insurance. They’re going to get their money back. My people aren’t getting anything.’”14 The effort began to “reimagine,” normalize, and even romanticize crime, violence, and riots, as raging against the machine. And it’s quite safe to say that no one looted a Gucci bag or a pair of Nike kicks to eat them. A major publisher even coughed up a book with a title clear enough to help along the new messaging, “In Defense of Looting.”
It’s all gaslighting, but also a message that otherwise vile, ugly, and dangerous mob action should be thought of . . . differently. And so it was with the BLM “protests.”
Liberal journalists engaged in verbal gymnastics to often describe the riots as “racial justice protests” and asked their audiences not to believe in reality or to grow more fearful about what the future has in store for them.
For example, during rioting in Minneapolis at the end of May 2020, as reporter Ali Velshi of MSNBC stood in front of a burning building, he absurdly said he was witnessing “mostly a protest” that “is not generally speaking, unruly.” Velshi then sought to make excuses for the arson and looting taking place around him by saying that “it does have to be understood that this city has got, for the last several years, an issue with police, and it’s got a real sense of the deep sense of grievance of inequality.”15
During August 2020 rioting in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in a now infamous scene, a CNN reporter stood in front of a car that had been set on fire while an on-screen banner read: “Fiery but mostly peaceful protests after police shooting.”16 Should we describe September 11, 2001, as a day of “mostly peaceful” flights? Should we describe Hurricane Katrina as a “mostly peaceful” time on the world’s oceans? The liberal media simply couldn’t bring themselves to say anything derogatory about urban looters and rioters. This was because, for liberal journalists, job number one was legitimizing the unhinged and organized urban riots by Marxist and anarchist groups as normal and expected behavior because . . . Trump.
Newsrooms controlled by a supermajority of liberals and Democrats wasn’t an organic development, but a deliberate mission pursued with a fanatical focus. Liberal activists flock to journalism today because they understand that their agenda of fear and chaos flows from the control of mass media. They don’t want to simply report the news; they want to change American society and the world.
A Simmering Fear All Their Own
How successful has the left been at taking control of the media and weaponizing it as an instrument of “social justice”? Consider this New York Times story from 1992 about a study revealing how far reporters’ political sympathies had shifted to the left. In an article headlined “Increasingly, Reporters Say They’re Democrats,” the newspaper reported on a survey of 1,400 journalists nationwide showing a dramatic increase in the percentage of reporters who are Democrats:
The report released in Washington showed that more than 44 percent of reporters now say they identify themselves as Democrats, up from about 36 percent in 1971. As the number of newsroom Democrats has increased, the number of reporters who say they are Republican has fallen from more than 26 percent in 1971 to about 16 percent. The survey, conducted by telephone, is the third in a series of studies of journalists’ attitudes since 1971.17
Fast-forward to 2014, and another long-term study of reporters’ sympathies and attitudes revealed just how successful the left had been. A mere 7 percent of reporters identified as Republicans:
A long-term study of reporters’ leanings and attitudes, “The American Journalist in the Digital Age,” shows that the drift toward liberalism has been going on for years within journalism. In 1971, Republicans made up 25.7% of all journalists. Democrats were 35.5%, and independents were 32.5%. Some 6.3% of responses were “other.”
By 2014, the share of journalists identifying as Republican had shrunk to 7.1%, an 18.6 percentage point drop. From having near-parity with the journalist Republicans in the 1970s, Democrats today outnumber Republicans today by four to one.18
As of 2023, the number of journalists identifying as Republicans collapsed to just 3.4 percent.19
Flooding the marketplace with propaganda is only possible when liberal activists are in control of the national conversation. For leftist activists and the establishment, it takes an enormous amount of energy to keep control of narratives and facades. All the energy at the national level is spent on projecting a particular image, outrage, protests, displays, press conferences, and publicizing demands. Perpetual victimhood is the expectation, and it remains the singular organizing principle.
No one naturally wants to be a victim, so how do you move people along into that hopeless pit? With fear-based propaganda about what is in store for the public—particularly women, gays, and people of color—if conservatives have power or are even allowed to be heard. Riots, of course, will conveniently further that narrative, but the leftist plate is full of strategies to bully and gaslight us into retreat and then surrender.
When you have contempt for those you are supposed to be serving, there will be unintended consequences. Every day, we see the deleterious effects of the fear itself the liberal news media promulgates via the strategies they use against us. The American people have noticed. The result is less trust and more suspicion of the media in general, creating a simmering fear all its own.
After all, what happens when the news industry you believed would keep the powerful in check was doing the bidding of the system itself? Bias is damaging and irritating, but it is also a dangerous signal that one of the important pillars of democracy has abandoned its duty, understandably adding to the fear born of betrayal and chaos in the public sphere.
From January 2021 to June 2022, as no one could avoid or honestly deny the collusion between media and government during the COVID-19 debacle, news consumers were confronted with a cascade of revelations about the growing distrust in media. Headlines20 at the political website Axios tell the story of increasing suspicion and even anger at the media and its protector, the establishment:
“Media Trust Hits New Low” (January 2021)
“Conservative Trust in Media has Cratered” (August 2021)
“Distrust in Political, Media, and Business Leaders Sweeps the Globe” (January 2022)
“Americans’ Trust in Tech Companies Hits New Low” (April 2022)
“The US Public Thinks Journalists Aren’t Doing a Good Job” (June 2022)
“Trust in News Collapses to Historic Low” (July 2022)
And . . .
“Media Confidence in US Matches 2016 Record Low” (October 2023)
Progressive favorites MSNBC and CNN were unmasked during both the Trump presidency and COVID as unserious propagandists for the leftist establishment, even as many in their audiences were swallowed up with the fear that flowed from their agitprop.
