Invaders in Our Living Room: Why We Love The Myth That Most Americans Believed The 1938 ‘War of the Worlds’ Broadcast

“The way we think about media to this day is heavily indebted to the very ideas behind the broadcast and its reception – that radio, and media, can constitute a kind of invasive psychological experiment. War of the Worlds and the panic about its panic are products of the moment when the young fields of social psychology and radio used one another to legitimize themselves. Its significance to American history, panic or not, is bigger than even popular myth allows.”