The 1931 radio broadcast, "The War of the Worlds," Orson Welles starts out (and ends) with a clear announcement that it is a dramatized reading of the book by H.G. Wells. Although if you start listening to the broadcast a few minutes in, it's as authentic as any real radio broadcast. The lines are spoken quite convincingly with realistic sound effects and background noises. It's not one bit surprising that this gave listeners a scare. Paired with the already existent heat and tension prior to World War II, some people panicked to an extent where they drove away from home and went into hiding. This radio broadcast went on to be thoroughly criticised for its "cruelty" by a lot of the papers and broadcasts of the time. This movement and uproar caused by an hour worth of realistic audio makes this radio show one of the most successful media projects of all time. The show starts out like a regular broadcast with occasional shifts to music with only some announcements of explosions on Mars and with an astronomer denying and criticising the incorrect notion that people had started to have, which was that there is extraterrestrial life on Mars. Later on there is a meteor strike somewhere in New Jersey and all this is reported to the audience quite really with again, occasional breaks into music like the radio shows at the time, which is then discovered to be an unidentified smooth cylindrical object with some kind of slithering wet leather like thing with tentacles coming out of it and people screaming at the back as the reporter, Mr. Phillips reports this. I'm going to stop here and not get into the entire story, although it goes on to encompass the voices of police officers, gunners, people from the crowd et cetera, but the point is how all these things lit up essential components of the influence of media on the masses. Of course, there's the obvious influence in this case, and that is that people were scared to an extent where they ran ou