The anniversary of the famous War of the Worlds radio dramatization in 1938 inevitably brings news media references to the panic and hysteria the program supposedly set off across the United States.
Front page of the Chicago Herald Examiner, Halloween, 1938
Such references have become like a cliché, unoriginal assertions blithely made, and yet immune to compelling contrary evidence.
Take, for one example, the claim casually offered the other day on a local television news program in Salt Lake City. The news reader introduced a segment recalling the 1938 show by declaring:
“In eight decades, nothing has really scared our country like the old War of the Worlds broadcast.”
No supporting evidence accompanied that claim, as if the presumed effects of the broadcast of October 30, 1938, are so accepted that documentation isn’t necessary.
The War of the Worlds dramatization aired over CBS radio and starred 23-year-old Orson…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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