On Halloween eve 1938, Orson Welles aired a radio drama of The War of the Worlds as fake news bulletins, and America lost its mind: listeners fled their homes, jammed the roads, and grabbed shotguns to fight Martians. It is the classic warning about the power of media to spark mass hysteria.
Hardly anyone panicked, because hardly anyone was listening. The broadcast aired opposite a hugely popular rival show, and audience surveys that night found only a tiny fraction tuned to Welles, most of them aware it was a play. The 'nationwide panic' was largely manufactured the next day by newspapers, which were losing advertising to radio and were delighted to paint the upstart medium as dangerous and irresponsible. Researchers who later dug into it, including a 2013 reassessment, found scattered anecdotes and no evidence of mass flight, hospital surges, or the chaos legend claims. So the panic was mostly a panic about radio, printed by its competitors. The broadcast was a clever bit of theatre. The real fiction was the story the papers told about how everyone reacted to it.