I was going to title this “Fake News and Battle of the Bulge” in homage to St. Merv. Merv was with the 101st Airborne at the Battle of the Bulge in 1944. “Band of Brothers” is his story. We were together on 9/11 watching the news on TV as it came streaming in (a reference to amount not technology). He, a combat veteran of both WWII and Korea, walked away muttering: “Too much information. No one can process this.” Too much information is the norm today with a 24/7 livestream. What human can process it all? What is reportage and what is fearmongering? Which is news and which is fake news?
I listen to a radio program from LA titled “Handel on the Law.” Give a listen to his program from March 21, 2020. After every commercial break, during his 3 hour program, he’s excitedly, expectantly, gleefully(?) was giving the numbers of those hospitalized and dead from COVID. After about the 15th time of doing this, he seems to realize the numbers aren’t going up at all let alone rocketing skyward.
How’d we get here? How’d we get to National Enquirer sensationalism becoming mainline news? The First Gulf War was reported in real-time and real-time pictures looked like Hollywood movies. 10 years later they embedded reporters with the invasion of Iraq. The story become “my story” to the reporter. And then in 2007 the smartphone makes everyone a reporter and instant access to the internet makes everyone an expert.
This remark from the 2013 book The Invention of Murder also applies: In 1890’s London a newspaper vendor was prosecuted , convicted, and sentenced to 31 days hard labor for shouting, “‘Another horrible murder and mutilation. Jack the Ripper at work again.” This was two years after the murders had ceased. He was sentenced in part says the author, “because of the still-ready-to-be-ignited fears” (Flanders, Judith, The Invention of Murder, 775).
So does FCC Section 73.1217 apply? This rule “forbids broadcasters from airing programs that are false where it is foreseeable that the broadcast will tie up the resources of first responders or that the broadcast will otherwise cause harm to people or damage to property, and where such harm is in fact caused”.[1] This came about because of infamous 1938 CBS radio broadcast by Orson Welles ‘reporting’ H.G. Wells fictional War of the Worlds as fact.
The information below comes from a December 1948 Harper’s magazine article by John Houseman titled, “The Men from Mars”. Houseman, with Welles, was one of the founding partners of the Mercury Theater which aired the program. After the routine announcements that proceeded every broadcast there was an announcement that a dramatization of H.G. Wells novel was about to be performed (Gentlemen, Scholars, and Scoundrels, 24). At the end of the first half another disclaimer aired (35).
But people heard the show as reality. They rushed out of their houses with wet towels over their faces, people were crying hysterically, police switchboards were flooded. People from Kansas, to Salt Lake, to Texas, to Missouri, and LA contacted authorities for more details (27). This is in contradistinction to us 21st century people who when confronted with crisis, real or imagined, buy toilet paper and consult smartphones for real-time “information.”
Even the people who staged this performance were agog at the reaction. Incidences that were “reported” on air would have taken days or even weeks to occur. “’Nothing about the broadcast was in the least credible. …Our actual broadcast time from the first mention of the meteorites to the fall of New York City, was less than forty minutes. During that time men travelled long distances, large bodies of troops were mobilized, cabinet meeting were held, savage battles fought on land and in the air.” And here follows the salient point for us “And millions of people accepted it – emotionally if not logically” (30).
This is important because this is what happens to most of us when we see, read, hear things that come to us via smartphones, computer screens, or TMZ. Houseman said that in order for people to be entertained by fiction – whether plays, movies, TV, or radio – they have to slide out of their real time into the dramatic time of the entertainment. Houseman doesn’t say this but I do: this is part of the suspension of belief that is required to be entertained by fiction. However, there is a problem when a person is convinced, coerced, or connived into regarding something in dramatic time as if it were happening in real time.
Houseman credits Welles understanding of this and his ability to manipulate it for the reason millions were duped and hundreds of thousands driven to hysterics. Also, the fact that it was within 35 days of Munich crisis (Hitler’s first big power grab), and Americans had switched from getting their news from the press but over the air, and “A new technique of ‘on-the-spot’ reporting had been developed and eagerly accepted by an anxious and news-hungry world” (28, emphasis mine).
Reread the italics, and see this has been the evolution or devolution of us from the 1990’s to today. As there is wisdom in the ‘underground’ saying that I saw in odd places during the pandemic: “The ones selling you the fear are selling you the cure”, so there is wisdom in saying when reportage can’t be distinguished from fearmongering get your news from somewhere else.
[1] https://www.broadcastlawblog.com/2013/10/articles/orson-welles-war-of-the-worlds-75-years-later-what-would-the-fcc-do-now/#:~:text=Most%20prominent%20among%20the%20FCC,broadcast%20will%20tie%20up%20the
