75 Years Ago, 'War of the Worlds' Started a Panic. Or Did It? (2013)

I like the idea that there is some hard-nosed blue collar people out there trying to speak truth to power but it seems that they speak for power because it pays.

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

As you said, a few owners control virtually all of corporate media. And those owners are not unbiased. And those owners and the people they hire in management have agendas. And that trickles all the way down to the newsroom floor, just like it does in any company.

At any rate, journalism needs a business model revamp for the 21st century. Substack is part of the answer, but other things need to be tried too.

I disagree, we can do a lot better than just blindly believing, aka "trusting", any claim just because it was made by someone in the past.

First off, in a time when it was common to broadcast all kinds of shows on the radio, including variety shows, readings of novels, and plays/dramas, I find it rather dubious that a large number of people panicked and thought there's an actual alien invasion rather than just assuming it's another show.

It also wasn't the only thing on the radio at that moment. The linked article mentions that a far more popular comedy variety show was broadcasting at the same time, so again, a huge number of people just panicked and thought aliens were invading, even though they could turn their dial and see only one station was talking about it.

Finally, where are the first hand accounts? Where are the accounts of people who panicked, or who's family members, friends, or neighbors were panicking?

Given all of this, I think what's likely is that the broadcast raised some eyebrows at the time (some people perhaps called the police for more information), and was later blown out of proportion for publicity reasons.

"Question: When were you first aware of the trouble caused?

Welles: Immediately after the broadcast was finished when people told me of the large number of phone calls received."

Note he's not even confirming he spoke to someone who would know if there was a 'large number of phone calls'.

https://archive.org/details/citizenwellesbio00brad

That would not convince anyone that believes in the conspiracy, since of course Bill Gates would not use an off the shelf GPS chip, he created an all new needle-sized chip in his secret laboratory.

It's impossible to fight a conspiracy based on magic technology by presenting facts since in their mind, that magic technology already exists even if they don't fully understand how it works.

ID2020 and similar projects have been things pushed for many years, including by Bill Gates himself. They have been pushed to establish a universal ID, as well as to track vaccinations.

As expected though, on topics on which the lay person won't have a solid grasp of, parts of the message get distorted as it is shared between laypeople. Instead of "providing means to present unified ID and keep track of vaccines recevied by means of epidermal identity chip", it becomes "literally a chip in the vaccine".

Back to my original point. Have you not heard of the coming Vaccine Passports? There is no point to them if not to track and verify if people have taken the relevant vaccinations. The first wave of these "passports" probably won't be issued by chip (more likely to be phone apps or smart cards), however they will definitely be used to track movement and identity to control the spread of COVID.

To deny this is happening strikes me as odd. Especially when vaccine passport trials are already up and running across the world.