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Comment by dwd | Hacker News Reader

The same could be said for radio, whether Orson Wells "Alien Invasion" broadcast or the multitude of April 1st jokes that got out of hand.

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Apparently the "fallout" was an exaggeration that Orson went along with because it gave him more publicity. From the Wikipedia:

>"The supposed panic was so tiny as to be practically immeasurable on the night of the broadcast. ... Radio had siphoned off advertising revenue from print during the Depression, badly damaging the newspaper industry. So the papers seized the opportunity presented by Welles’ program to discredit radio as a source of news. The newspaper industry sensationalized the panic to prove to advertisers, and regulators, that radio management was irresponsible and not to be trusted."

and

"Welles later embraced the story as part of his personal myth. "Houses were emptying, churches were filling up; from Nashville to Minneapolis there was wailing in the streets and the rending of garments," he told Peter Bogdanovich years later."

"CBS, too, found reports ultimately useful in promoting the strength of its influence. radio management was irresponsible and not to be trusted."

I loved to ask my grandmother about this because she recalled listening to the original broadcast. She said the station would take commercial breaks to interrupt the story, and they reminded listeners it was a fictitious broadcast when taking these breaks. She didn't believe that anyone could be fooled by it, at least not to the extent that was reported.

Oh how times don't really change.

According to family folk lore, during WWII when they had double summer time, my grandmother managed to put the clocks 2 hours forwards instead of 2 hours back. So woke up in the small hours and turned on radio to BBC and heard German (they transmitted to Germany as propaganda, and during night used channels normally broadcasting in English). Immediately wakes whole household - "we've been invaded - the Germans have taken over the BBC"!

Radio Ambulante (NPR poscast) did an investigation on a similar story in Ecuador and it looks very much real. Not a myth.

https://radioambulante.org/en/translation/the-extraterrestri...

Thank you for sharing! My father used to tell me about this story. It's good to know it's apocryphal.

“Getting it Wrong” tells about this and other commonly believed media myths

Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0520262093/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_y5...

This is true about how the events unfolded in the US, but the “War of the Worlds” story was translated and re-broadcast in Latin America where it had a much more devastating effect. In Ecuador, even the army and the police were rushed to the site where the invasion was supposedly taking place, intensifying the panic for average citizens. Never underestimate the potential power of a fictional story that is irresponsibly disclosed.

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas...

Fascinating - thanks for sharing. Newspapers always play the same dirty tricks - they're doing the same now with the tech reporting because they're losing ad revenue to the tech companies.

It's not feasible for every trusted source of knowledge to have their own radio station, so the sources utilize existing stations, and consumers have no choice but to tune into those stations.

It's perfectly feasible for every trusted source of knowledge to run a web server, and they actually do it, so it's sad that consumers don't connect directly to those servers and instead use middlemen.

I know we're not supposed to discuss downvotes, but there's a sibling comment that makes the point I wanted to make, but it's dead. It seems fine, and the user's history is filled with dead comments that mostly also seem fine.

Regardless, if anyone has a response to a bunch of websites being a worse security model than one giant platform, you can reply to me instead.

if you click into that comment (through the timestamp) you can vouch for it, which if vouched by enough people will show the comment.

The account is likely shadow-banned or similar, so their comments are dead by default.

Also, if you look through their comment history, you can often find the comment(s) that got them shadow-banned. And if their ~recent comment history is good, with many vouched comments, you can ask dang to un-ban them.

People are not looking for trusted sources of knowledge. They are looking for entertainment.

> People are not looking for trusted sources of knowledge. They are looking for entertainment.

Which people? Whose people? This is not a statement of psychological truth. It may however describe a societal truth.

But it is not true that people in all countries want above all to be entertained. People struggle in undemocratic countries. Education makes democracy strong. It also breeds rebels.

Public discourse reflects education. A society conditions its citizens to think a certain way. The typical conditioning involves protecting the society. The flag, the anthem, the history, the current power structure and its wars.

It's sad to see journalism collapse in a democracy. It's sad and perhaps fatal for democracy if people have been conditioned to be infantile and their implanted desire for gratification has overwhelmed their thinking and speech.

Then you elect them.

Trust is a loaded concept.

What people trust is generally what fits their worldview which is increasingly reinforced by the filter bubbles provided by tech companies. The increasing polarisation and tribalism is made worse by the traditional network programming and now algorithms that present what the audience is comfortable to see and hear.

I like using DDG because it doesn't filter, but at the same time I hate wading through utter crap and being the filter.

Twitter for all its flaws is pretty good at giving everyone a voice so you can read something and then the criticisms without having to aggregate that from multiple sites.

How often do you need to be the filter? I’m genuinely curious because your experience is very different from my own, where I’ve been using DDG for years and I only notice poor results roughly 1 in 100 of the times, and then I’m just a quick “g! <search term>” away from slightly higher quality results.

Political news. G! does a better job of pushing smaller regional papers and more left/right leaning outlets and blogs down the rankings so the mainstream media gets more of a look in.

What prevents those trusted sources from being similarly hacked once they're now the main arbiters of important information? I'd even argue this may be more dangerous especially if tech and security are not their core focus.

> The same could be said for radio

Yes, except the FCC can forcefully suspend the operations of a radio station.

I think radio is probably a better source than Twitter as a whole, however they did air (still air?) Coast to Coast AM for decades.

Though Art Bell said the show was "pure entertainment", anyone who tuned in without that context heard what sounded like a serious news talk program about aliens, crystal healing, reptilians, etc, etc.

Is there any limit on their ability to do this?

There's a documentary I saw that explains that the hubbub around Welles' "War of the Worlds" broadcast was just to cover up the arrival of Red Lectroids.

Regarding Red Lectroids, see also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Buckaroo_Ban...

Not even remotely the same thing.

tl;dr don't rely on a single source

Bingo. Information should always be confirmed with at least one other (hopefully) independent source. The more sources, the merrier. If there aren't independent sources then don't jump to conclusions.

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