The War of the Worlds (original broadcast: October 30, 1938)
The Mercury Theatre on the Air
The finest radio drama of the 1930's was The Mercury Theatre on the Air, a show featuring the acclaimed New York drama company founded by Orson Welles and John Houseman. In its brief run, it featured an impressive array of talents, including Agnes Moorehead, Bernard Herrmann, and George Coulouris. The show is famous for its notorious War of the Worlds broadcast, but the other shows in the series are relatively unknown. This site has many of the surviving shows, and will eventually have all of them.
The show first broadcast on CBS and CBC in July 1938. It ran without a sponsor until December of that year, when it was picked up by Campbell's Soup and renamed The Campbell Playhouse. All of the surviving Mercury Theatre shows are available from this page in RealAudio format (some are also in MP3 format). There are several Campbell Playhouse episodes available here as well, in both RealAudio and MP3 formats; the rest are being added gradually.
http://www.mercurytheatre.info/
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BRAINWASHING:
How The British Use The Media for Mass Psychological Warfare
by L. Wolfe
Printed in The American Almanac, May 5, 1997
"I know the secret of making the average American believe anything I want him to. Just let me control television.... You put something on the television and it becomes reality. If the world outside the TV set contradicts the images, people start trying to change the world to make it like the TV set images...."
--Hal Becker, media 'expert' and management consultant, the Futures Group, in an interview in 1981
The "Radio Research Project"
As [WALTER] Lippmann was writing, the radio, the first major mass media technology to invade the home, was coming into prominence. Unlike the movies, which were viewed in theaters by large groups of people, the radio provided an individualized experience within the home, and centered on the family. By 1937, out of 32 million American families, some 27.5 million had a radio set--a larger percentage than had cars, telephones, or even electricity.
That same year, the Rockefeller Foundation funded a project to study the effects of radio on the population. Recruited to what became known as the "Radio Research Project," headquartered at Princeton University, were sections of the Frankfurt School, now transplanted from Germany to America, as well as individuals such as Hadley Cantril and Gordon Allport, who were to become key components of Tavistock's American operations. Heading the project was the Frankfurt School's Paul Lazerfeld; his assistant directors were Cantril and Allport, along with Frank Stanton, who was to head the CBS News division, and later become its president, as well as chairman of the board of the RAND Corporation.
The project was presaged by theoretical work done earlier in the studies of war propaganda and psychosis, and the work of Frankfurt School operatives Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. This earlier work had converged on the thesis that mass media could be used to induce regressive mental states, atomizing individuals and producing increased lability. (These induced mental conditions were later dubbed by Tavistock itself as "brainwashed" states, and the process of inducing them called "brainwashing.")
In 1938, at the time he was head of the music section of the Radio Research Project, Adorno wrote that listeners to radio music programs:
"...fluctuate between comprehensive forgetting and sudden dives into recognition. They listen atomistically and dissociate what they hear.... They are not childlike, but they are childish; their primitivism is not that of the undeveloped, but that of the forcibly retarded."
The Radio Research Project's findings, published in 1939, backed up Adorno's thesis of "enforced retardation," and serve as a brainwashers' handbook.
In studies on the serialized radio dramas, commonly known as 'soap operas' (so named, because many were sponsored by soap manufacturers), Herta Hertzog found that their popularity could not be attributed to any socio-economic characteristics of listeners, but rather to the serialized format itself, which induced habituated listening. The brainwashing power of serialization was recognized by movie and television programmers; to this day, the afternoon 'soaps' remain among the most addictive of television fare, with 70% of all American women over 18 watching at least two of these shows each day.
Another Radio Research Project study investigated the effects of the 1938 Orson Welles radio dramatization of H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, about an invasion from Mars. Some 25% of the listeners to the show, which was formatted as if it were a news broadcast, believed that an invasion was under way, creating a national panic--this, despite repeated and clear statements that the show was fictional. Radio Project researchers found that most people didn't believe that Martians had invaded, but rather that a German invasion was under way. This, the researchers reported, was because the show had followed the 'news bulletin' format that had earlier accompanied accounts of the war crisis around the Munich conference. Listeners reacted to the format, not the content of the broadcast.
The project's researchers had proven that radio had already so conditioned the minds of its listeners, making them so fragmented and unthinking, that repetition of format was the key to popularity.
[end snip]
Bibilography
# The Media Cartel That Controls What You Think, by L. Wolfe, The American Almanac, May 5, 1997.
# The Cartelization of the Media, by Jeffrey Steinberg, The American Almanac, May 5, 1997.
# Direct British Control of the U.S. Media, The American Almanac, May 5, 1997.
# British "Fellow Travellers" Control Major U.S. Media, by Jeffrey Steinberg, The American Almanac, May 5, 1997.
# Tavistock's Language Project: The Origin of "Newspeak", The American Almanac, May 5, 1997.
# For Whom The Polls Toll, by L. Wolfe, The American Almanac, May 5, 1997.
http://american_almanac.tripod.com/warfare.htm
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