Global digital divide not so great anymore

As the U.N.'s World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) convenes in Geneva, Reuters reports that the "digital divide" between rich and poor nations is quickly narrowing, according to a World Bank report. The report notes "that telecommunications services to poor countries were growing at an explosive rate" and calls into question "a costly United Nations campaign to bring hi-tech telecommunications to the developing world." Apparently "half the world's population now enjoys access to a fixed-line telephone, the report said, and 77 percent to a mobile network -- surpassing a WSIS campaign goal that calls for 50 percent access by 2015." Meanwhile, as Laurence Lessig notes in a Wired commentary, 14 states have followed Pennsylvania in passing legislation that bans or stymies the creation of municipal wi-fi networks - leaving many Americans with access only to limited and overpriced commercial broadband access (or no access at all, because it's so expensive or because private interests don't find poor inner cities to be commercially attractive). Perhaps, before long, third world countries will surpass the United States in broadband internet access.

Republicans down on the AARP?

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has the goods on the Bush administration's plan to "destroy" the AARP because of its opposition to President Bush's Social Security plan:

"They are the boulder in the middle of the highway to personal savings accounts," said Charlie Jarvis, the president of USA Next, a conservative lobbying group. "We will be the dynamite that removes them." He sounded more like Wile E. Coyote than a former interior official in the Reagan and Bush I administrations. "They can run, but they can't hide," he said. But the walker-and-cane set is hard to picture in the Road Runner role.

Dowd also quotes The Washington Monthly, which calls USA Next's United Seniors Association, "a self-styled AARP rival, 'a soft-money slush fund for a single G.O.P.-friendly industry: pharmaceuticals.'" Yes, it's all starting to sound grotesquely familiar.

Sometimes Dowd comes across as too preachy or too smart-ass for her own good; but this time she's got it about right. And I'm glad she's quoting other sources, such as The Washington Monthly and the NYT's own Glen Justice, who reported that USA Next, "which has spent millions on Republican policy fights, has pledged to spend as much as $10 million on ads and other tactics to 'dynamite' AARP and get Americans to rip up Social Security. It's hiring some of the same consultants who helped the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, who dynamited John Kerry, a war hero, by sliming him as a war criminal."

But the one observation Dowd makes that really hits home is this:

Once again, just as W. runs into political trouble, he floats above the fray while the help takes out his opponents. Just as John McCain was smeared by Bush supporters in 2000, Swift Boat assassins can rid the president of any meddlesome adversaries now.

The USA Next group intends to combine the two ruthless success stories of the Bush re-election: the Swiftian tactic of amplifying its vicious and dishonest attacks through the media, and the Rovian tactic of hanging gay marriage like an anvil around the neck of a foe.

One of these days, I hope, President Bush will finally be held responsible for the vicious and underhand methods to manipulate the press undertaken in his name. That's not to say that other presidents on both sides of the aisle haven't engaged in media-manipulative skulduggery: they all have, from Teddy Roosevelt on. But President Bush has pushed the envelope far beyond previous limits. It's his administration. The buck must stop with him. I really think his actions are having a deleterious impact on a functioning civic democracy. He should - finally - be exposed for what he has done and pay a steep political price. Perhaps going after the AARP will be his Waterloo. Perhaps ...

Yes, war is heck!

I didn't bother to watch Tuesday's "Frontline" report on PBS about U.S. troops fighting in Iraq; we were out seeing "Million Dollar Baby" and in any case, I'd been put off by all the reports of PBS interference in the report. As a Los Angeles Times editorial notes:

Fearful of being hit with stiff FCC indecency fines, the nonprofit PBS distributed a censored copy of a report chronicling U.S. soldiers charged with keeping Iraq's main highway open.The crew of "Frontline" showed a small group of soldiers who did their best under tough conditions, and who reacted in entirely human ways when their lives were threatened by the enemy. But some viewers, including those who watched on Los Angeles station KCET, saw the censored version of the report, which presented the remarkable fiction of soldiers in battle watching their language.

The worst part is that even the LA public broadcaster, KCET - one of PBS's flagship stations - backed down and showed the neutered version that PBS sent out as the default broadcast. (I don't know which version Rochester's WXXI showed, but I'd bet my next payroll deduction for Social Security it was the neutered version.) I'm getting really tired of conservative assaults on the broadcast media, in the name of "indecency" regulation. It's particularly galling during a time of war. I've always been a firm believer that if a country decides to go to war, the media ought, as a public duty, to show that war in all its gory detail, so that the electorate can see first hand what is being done in its name. But now we can't even see U.S. troops being pottymouths! If only Americans knew of the image of U.S. forces being beamed around the rest of the world. But I think many actually prefer the sanitized version they get by this country's media. Beyond the war, "Frontline" is the latest casualty in a broader war of censorship on the airwaves; and after the PBS's craven backdown over the recent "Postcards from Buster" incident, I'm afraid it looks like public television has pretty much thrown in the towel.

Apparently some broadcasters are considering a court challenge to the FCC's indecency rules. I wonder if anny of these broadcasters will be from PBS?

HST RIP

I note with sadness the passing (well, suicide) of Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. Here's a few apt sentences about the man and the legend, written by Cintra Wilson for Salon:

If artists are the uninsulated emotional conductors for the rest of society, Thompson was a one-man power grid of paranoia, revulsion and defiance. He was a canary in our collective coal mine, an ulcer on our societal tongue, a warning. He was physically a big and strong enough man to recklessly embody the idea that we should all Beware of Where We Are Headed. A shuddering red flag.

Alienation was a big part of Thompson's voice, but not (I believe) because he wanted to be alienated. HST wrote very movingly about participating in the thrillingly inclusive group energies of the 1960s. He just didn't really fit in very well to anyone else's scene. He was a bit too charismatic, clean-cut and bizarre on his BSA, with his cigarette holder, to blend in with the Hell's Angels. He needed to be the center of attention too much to comfortably share the spotlight in rooms where other luminati of the day were having their moments -- rock stars, politicians, the various and infamous. Thompson was trapped, somewhat, in the limbo between Journalist and Personality: the neither-nor underworld of the rock-star scribe, who wields a little too much personal gravity to yield the focus to a subject other than himself.

Where's Novak?

I'm glad I ran across this piece by Tony Norman of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Norman's opening paragraph cries in despair: "Will someone please explain in simple, easy-to-understand language, why we never see right-wing pundit Bob Novak's name mentioned in the same breath as reporters facing jail time for contempt in the Valerie Plame affair?" Good question! We hear almost nothing about Novak, even while a three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in Washington has upheld a previous court ruling that the New York Times's Judith Miller and Time magazine's Matthew Cooper "should be jailed for contempt for failing to disclose the source of a story neither had any intention of publishing in the first place." I brought this up in the blog way back on Dec. 6, and nothing's changed since then. (Read Amy Sullivan's excellent piece (originally in Washington Monthly, for some more background.)

Of course, in this poisonous political climate, the problem goes much deeper than just Novak, as Norman makes clear.

The persecution and prosecution of reporters is taking place at a time when the White House has perfected the art of manipulating the Fourth Estate. With recent revelations that three prominent columnists were paid "consultants" for administration policies, it's easy to see why the First Amendment isn't taken particularly seriously these days.

And then, with the announcement that "Jeff Gannon," a proud sycophant of the White House press corps, is actually James Guckert, a Republican dirty trickster and homosexual prostitute, one has to wonder whether this administration's contempt for journalists knows any bounds.

Addendum, Feb. 22: Thanks to a reader for pointing out an explainer about Novak I missed in Slate.com the other day.

From "Jeff Gannon" to the Daily Show

Frank Rich of the New York Times provides this effective - and, frankly, frightening - overview of the whole "Jeff Gannon" White House press corps incident. "Gannon" was the fake news guy who kept being allowed into White House press conferences to ask softball questions to Press Secretary Scott McClellan or even the president himself. Rich explains the rest as follows:

"Jeff Gannon's" real name is James D. Guckert. His employer was a Web site called Talon News, staffed mostly by volunteer Republican activists. Media Matters for America, the liberal press monitor that has done the most exhaustive research into the case, discovered that Talon's "news" often consists of recycled Republican National Committee and White House press releases, and its content frequently overlaps with another partisan site, GOPUSA, with which it shares its owner, a Texas delegate to the 2000 Republican convention. Nonetheless, for nearly two years the White House press office had credentialed Mr. Guckert, even though, as Dana Milbank of The Washington Post explained on Mr. Olbermann's show, he "was representing a phony media company that doesn't really have any such thing as circulation or readership."

That's why if you're going to let Talon News into White House press conferences you should really also let in "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart." Fair enough?

Global warming? What global warming?

On the day the Kyoto Treaty on global warming goes into force in 141 countries around the world (but not the U.S.) the BBC presents a revealing and rather shocking slide show showing some of the (probable) effects of man's impact on the environment. Don't be alarmed ... no wait, yes ... be alarmed!

Media merger frenzy

This from today's Washington Post:

On the surface, the frenzy of telecommunications mergers in the past few weeks raises relatively clear-cut questions for lawmakers and regulators who will be weighing the deals: Will consumers and businesses be harmed if long-distance choices disappear when AT&T and MCI are swallowed by telephone giants SBC and Verizon?

In many parts of the country, the mergers would mean that two of the top three providers of long-distance telephone service are combining, leaving one overwhelmingly dominant player. Ordinarily, such corporate marriages have trouble getting approved.

But several experts said they expect as many questions to be raised about whether the phone giants would gain too much power over access to the Internet, especially for large businesses.

Worried representatives of large businesses and consumer groups said they will begin sounding the alarm, at the Federal Communications Commission, the Justice Department and on Capitol Hill.

I'm not an expert in this area of telecommunications regulation, but it seems that those companies that are about to be swallowed up, like AT&T and MCI, are also "major providers of the 'Internet backbone'". The companies that buy them - SBC (Southern Bell) and Verizon - could end up having a near-monopoly over most people's - and companies' - access to the Internet, and could charge accordingly. And that would be bad.

The muckrakers aren't dead ... not quite, anyway

In my Introduction to Mass Communication course I usually get around to talking a bit about the so-called "muckrakers" - the early 20th century magazine journalists who did everything they could to uncover corruption and scandal in government and Big Business. The muckrakers – they were given their name by President Theodore Roosevelt – were at their height during the progressive era of American politics, for about a decade from 1902 – when McClures magazine ran a series of investigative reports on life-insurance frauds, labor conditions, business monopolies, and political scandal in city governments. During this period there were numerous exposes, such as Ida Tarbell’s series, “History of Standard Oil” (which took on John D. Rockefeller’s oil conglomerate), and Lincoln Steffens' “Shame of the Cities,” which tackled urban problems (both of these ran in McClures). Other magazines joined in the fray, including Collier’s (with the “Great American Fraud” series, and Cosmopolitan (“The Treason of the Senate”). Even Ladies' Home Journal got into the act. The era was brought to a close by the coming of the Great War, though it might also have had something to do with big industrialists such as Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan buying up some muckraking magazines so they could shut them up.

The Muckrakers’ tradition never completely went away in the press. It morphed into investigative journalism, interpretive journalism, new journalism, etc. And the muckraking legacy can still found in magazines such as The Nation, Z, Mother Jones – and even The New Yorker, mainly in the form of Seymour Hersh (see here for his latest New Yorker piece on the Bush administration’s intentions toward Iran). Hersh last May also broke the story about administration involvement at the highest levels with the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal.

The point is not that we should applaud today’s magazines for taking a swipe at the Republican government just because it's Republican. It’s that we should applaud the media – or any branch of the media, no matter how small and (now) insignificant – still willing to take a swipe at any and all malfeasance by Big Government and Big Business (of course, magazines as a medium just don't have the impact they had a century ago). And god knows, there’s still plenty of malfeasance to go around. It just so happens that the Republicans currently run everything, so they should be Target No. 1 - until the Democrats get back in (whenever that'll be!) But we also need in the media that progressive tone of shocked and righteous indignation about Abu Ghraib, Enron, Tyco, and so on – and that, I fear, is slowly fading, Seymour Hersh’s work notwithstanding.

Local TV misses the mark again

Yes it's true: Local TV news just doesn't give American citizens a very good service when it comes to reporting on political events - not even during a presidential election year. A new study of local news coverage has just been released by researchers at the University of Wisconsin and Seton Hall University, and led by the Norman Lear Center at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California (see the New York Times piece on the report here). It's pretty damning.

The Benton Policy web site summarizes the findings: A mere "8% of TV newscasts included a report about a local race. By contrast, more than half contained a report on the presidential race. In the 11 markets studied, the hours of advertising by House candidates eclipsed actual coverage of those races by a ratio of 5 to 1." This pretty much bears out what most studies of local news have found. And since a recent Gallup poll results found that 51% of respondents get news from local TV.

I noted back on Nov 29 a Lear Center report that during the last election, about $1.6 billion was spent by political parties on TV election ads - the vast majority of which went to these local TV markets. As a result, almost two million political spots were aired on 615 stations in the top 100 TV markets — equivalent to 677 full days of advertising! As I said back in November, I think local TV stations have largely abrogated their public service responsibility to provide comprehensive coverage of national, and especially local, elections. The election-related pieces local stations did air tended to be pretty flimsy, to say the least. Strategy and horserace stories outnumbered issues stories by a ratio of 3:2; ad watch stories, meanwhile, made up less than one percent of all campaign stories (Lear Center). States Martin Kaplan, associate dean of the Annenberg School and one of the lead authors of the study: "I think most stations fear that covering politics is ratings poison. ... Interestingly, they don't seem to fear that running a torrent of political ads hurts them with their audience."

Why do people hate Sinclair?

For many on the critical and progressive left, Sinclair Broadcasting has become their new bete noir, eclipsing even Fox News. This is especially the case post-Stolen Honor (the anti-Kerry "Swift Boat vets" saga). Read this piece by Eric Klinenberg in Rolling Stone and you may start to see why.

Boring old gits to wed

You've got to hand it to the British press: They really know how to not give a crap about a story, yet still put that story of the front page. Take Prince Charles' announcement that he's finally going to marry Camillia Parker-Bowles. The BBC apparently went "over the top" with its coverage. But Fleet Street? Not so much. But still a little bit. Media Guardian notes the "decidedly republican stances" taken by The Star and The Independent. Here's The Star's take:

"Boring old gits to wed" was the Star's front-page splash headline for a story with the byline, "Hugh Cares, royal correspondent."

And as for The Independent, it

went for one of its high concept, single issue front pages, which have become something of a trademark for the paper since it went tabloid. Under the headline "Here is the news you may have missed", the Indy has teasers for 11 stories it considers more important than the leaked royal wedding plans - including "North Korea warns: 'We have nuclear weapons'", "Sinn Fein leaders 'backed robbery'" and "Tate's record ticket sales". Finally, in the bottom right hand corner of the front page, "And in other news... Charles to wed, Page 6".

Social Security ignorance and inertia

A poll produced by The Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, and Harvard University, shows a worrying level of ignorance among Americans on the issue of Social Security and its solvency. Decades of relative media inattention to Social Security and its key role in society, coupled with a steadily rising drumbeat of conservative commentary, has undoubtedly contributed to the confusion. The poll notes that a majority of Americans "supports the president's proposal to allow Americans to invest part of their Social Security contributions in stocks or bonds, although opinions on this and other aspects of the president's plan frequently are weakly held and easily moved." [My italics.] The article focuses on one 58-year-old man who thinks that private accounts (sorry - personal accounts) are appealing until he learns of the huge price tag involved (a price tag which, btw, will not actually solve the Social Security shortfall). On balance, this lack of conviction is probably good news for those who, like me, wish to preserve Social Security in its present form. The thing is, most Americans (and me too, I must admit) live in perpetual ignorance about the political issues that influence their lives in what is, let's face it, a horribly complex political system from top to bottom. This is allied to the news media's fundamental inability (or unwillingness) to explain that system and how it works. This results in a political system dominated by lobbyists, big money, and "inside baseball" - and the public just tunes out unless the topic is something they think they can grasp easily, like the "values" issues of abortion, gun control, gay marriage, and all that. I know I sound like a modern-day Walter Lippmann elitist when I say this, but I believe this really is the way it is. Besides, I don't blame the people; I blame the media! (Can't go too far wrong there.)

So the good news is that if Republicans fail to frame Social Security in the media as a simple, one-dimensional "crisis-that-must-be solved-now" issue, Congressional inertia will take over. Multiple plans will emerge, none of which make any sense to the public (or, for that matter, to most legislators), and before long the whole issue will collapse in on itself and the status quo will be left untouched. In case this game plan sounds familiar to you, this is essentially how Clinton's health care plan fell apart in the early 1990s. That time inertia destroyed a potentially good plan; this time the same forces will hopefully destroy a very bad plan. And then we'll just have to wait a few years for a sensible president to appoint blue ribbon commission - of the Daniel Patrick Moynihan variety - to move in and fix the solvency problem in a sensible way. Fingers crossed.

Super Bowl ads: A Big Fat Waste?

Now I might not want to think about the Super Bowl, after my partner's team, the Philadelphia Eagles, lost narrowly to Bill Bellichick's New England Patriots last Sunday. Still, at least there's those fun ads, right? Well actually, I think even those are more boring than they used to be. But they are supposed to offer advertisers a lot of bang for their buck, right? Well, maybe not. Now Slate's Timothy Noah tells me that advertisers who ply their wares on the biggest media event of the year are wasting their money. Notes Noah:

Late last month, Broadcasting & Cable reported on an interesting experiment. It asked an ad agency called Starcom to enter Nielsen ratings data from last year's Super Bowl time slot into a computer to see whether the computer could "beat" a Super Bowl ad buy. The average price of a Super Bowl ad last year was $2.30 million per 30-second spot. (The price this year climbed to $2.40 million per 30-second spot.) Starcom fed that into the computer, too. Then it set about trying to see whether, by "spending" the same amount on counter-programming that other networks and cable channels ran against the Super Bowl, the computer could exceed the Super Bowl's slice of the audience that advertisers care about: adults between the ages of 18 and 49.

It wasn't even close. The computer's Super Bowl ad buy reached 29 percent of adults 18-49; the computer's counter-programming ad buy reached 47.3 percent of adults 18-49. In essence, buying ad time on various TV shows that were supposedly going unwatched—because "everybody" was watching the Super Bowl—would have enabled advertisers to reach 60 percent more potential customers.

Must carry, will carry?

Multichannel News and Broadcasting & Cable both note that more than 80 cable networks have signed an "open letter to Congress" opposing an FCC rule change that would allow something called "multicast must-carry." This change would extend ther current cable TV must-carry provisions to force cable companies (Multi-Service Operators, or MSOs) who carry a network station (e.g., NBC) to also carry a raft of sister cable networks (e.g., MSNBC, Bravo, Sc-Fi, USA, all owned by NBC-Universal parent GE). "Notably absent" from this cable alliance "were cable nets including ESPN, Bravo, USA, Nickelodeon, Sci Fi, TV Land, and others, owned by either Disney, Viacom, NBC Universal or Fox, all of whom also own TV stations seeking multicast carriage."

Clarke on Iraq

Interesting to note that this week's Sunday New York Times magazine begins a regular column by Richard A. Clarke, the former Bush security advisor who wrote the damning book Against all enemies and who testified so memorably before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States last March. Clarke provides a sobering appraisal of the recent hoopla over the recent Iraqi elections, reminding us of some basic home truths that got lost in all the emotional artifice surrounding this week's State of the Union Address.

[Al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-]Zarqawi and his followers do oppose democracy in Iraq, but they do so partly because they believe that the continuing electoral process (a constitutional referendum is planned for October of this year and a national election for December) is an American imposition. In this they are joined by the many Iraqis who simply want an occupying army to leave. In addition, Zarqawi's group seeks support from the Sunni Arab minority, which in any democratic process will lose power as compared with what it had in the decades of Baath Party rule.

Beyond Iraq, in the greater Muslim world, opposing democracy is not uppermost in the mind of Al Qaeda or the larger jihadist network. (In Saudi Arabia, for example, Al Qaeda wants the monarchy replaced by a more democratic government.) Radical Islamists are ultimately seeking to create something orthogonal to our model of democracy. They are fighting to create a theocracy or, in their vernacular, a caliphate (a divinely inspired government administered by a caliph as Allah's viceroy on earth). ...

Even without jihadists, Western democracies have hardly been immune to terrorism. The Irish Republican Army, the Baader-Meinhof gang of Germany and the Red Brigades of Italy all developed in democracies. Indeed, in the United States, the largest terrorist attack before Sept. 11 was conducted in Oklahoma by fully enfranchised American citizens.

Thus, it is not the lack of democracy that produced jihadist movements, nor will the creation of democracies quell them. To the extent that President Bush's new policy is turned into action, the jihadists may well take it as further provocative American meddling, similar to the reaction to the president's earlier attempt at reform in the region, the Greater Middle East Initiative, which was dead on arrival.

The Bulgegate story that never was

Dave Lindorff of Extra! and Salon reports on the then-potentially explosive pre-election story that was so effectively smothered: "Bulgegate". The story of President Bush's mysterious bulge under his jacket during the first Presidential debate was a serious and worthwhile story - complete with photographic evidence that he might have been "wired" - that deserved serious consideration in the media, but never got it. As Lindorff notes:

The so-called Bulgegate story had been getting tremendous attention on the Internet. Stories about it had also run in many mainstream papers, including the New York Times (10/9/04, 10/18/04) and Washington Post (10/9/04), but most of these had been light-hearted. Indeed, the issue had even made it into the comedy circuit, including the monologues of Jay Leno, David Letterman, Jon Stewart and a set of strips by cartoonist Garry Trudeau.

That the story hadn't gotten more serious treatment in the mainstream press was largely thanks to a well-organized media effort by the Bush White House and the Bush/Cheney campaign to label those who attempted to investigate the bulge as "conspiracy buffs" (Washington Post, 10/9/04). In an era of pinched budgets and an equally pinched notion of the role of the Fourth Estate, the fact that the Kerry camp was offering no comment on the matter - perhaps for fear of earning a "conspiracy buff" label for the candidate himself - may also have made reporters skittish. Jeffrey Klein, a founding editor of Mother Jones magazine, told Mother Jones (online edition, 10/30/04) he had called a number of contacts at leading news organizations across the country, and was told that unless the Kerry campaign raised the issue, they couldn't pursue it.

This is a pretty good single example of what Lance Bennett, in broader terms, would call "indexing" in the media. But Lindorff's more immediate and damning point is the New York Times's desire not only to spike the story, but also to deny it had even pursued it seriously (which it apparently had, as Times public editor Daniel Okrent has now admitted). Salon.com took up the cudgels, but Salon can't drive the news agenda like the New York Times can. Well, chalk up another glorious moment in the history of the valiant "liberal" press. Of course it is inconceivable that the press would have been as reticent if there had been evidence of John Kerry being wired. And if the Swift Boat Vets' campaign against Kerry deserved to to be treated as a serious news story, so did this! I don't think that's a controversial sentiment. Obviously the Times thinks otherwise. And remember that the "Swift Boat Vets" were bankrolled and heavily promoted by Bush-related forces, while those same forces railed against the Bulgegate story. And the media, faced with a well-disciplined, professional, and intense Republican media campaign, fell into line, as they always do. I am thoroughly disheartened to conclude that the mainstream media dropped the ball intentionally on this one.

MGM v. Grokster

The Benton Foundation reminds us about MGM v. Grokster, a key Supreme Court case coming up - on March 29 - that could settle the fate of P2P file-sharing networks so beloved by college students around the country. It focuses on a commentary piece by Mark Cuban:

The technology revolution is in peril because of the Government's efforts to protect the rights of content producers over content consumers. Next month, a case entitled MGM v. Grokster will go before the U.S. Supreme Court. The case is about whether peer-to-peer software that enables the peer-to-peer networks most of us read about--and few of us use--should be illegal or not. The big entertainment companies are pushing the argument that because some of their content gets stolen through the use of this software, all uses of the software should be illegal. ... In reality, this case isn't about whether music or movies are illegally downloaded using P2P software. This is purely about control. The entertainment industry wants control over technology that could impact its business.

Don't panic!

Interesting to note thaat a false declaration that the State of Connecticut was being evacuated led to ... absolutely no panic whatsoever. It seems that the message was sent erroneously during what was supposed to be a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. Of course this gets me to thinking about that greatest example of a media-inspired panic: Orson Welles' 1938 Mercury Theater of the Air broadcast of "The War of the Worlds" - where thousands of people thought that a real Martian invasion of the Earth was underway! (Here's the contemporary coverage from the New York Times of Monday, Oct 31, 1938.) Immediately after the broadcast, Henry Cantril, a Princeton University psychologist, organized a study into the effects of the broadcast on listeners. This study is oft-cited in the Communication field as it helped initiate a shift in media-related research away from powerful effects toward weak or minimal effects. And if this week's Connecticut broadcast is anything to go by, the effects of a single broadcast are very weak indeed (which is of course why you need to focus on multiple impressions of a message, agenda-setting, long-term influences, environmental, psychological, sociological, cultural factors ... I could go on, but I'll stop now.) :-)

Note, btw, that the original 1938 broadcast is available on the web, at http://www.earthstation1.com/wotw.html. Makes for interesting listening.