Okay, raise your hand if you believe Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds story. Come on, my hand’s already up. Get yours up, too.

Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean the story about Martians doing more to spur New Jersey tourism than Atlantic City. I meant the story about Welles creating a panic so widespread that listeners across the country rushed into their cars to escape the impending world destruction by driving to…where, exactly?

Hmm, maybe that should have been our first clue.

Another clue is that Welles’ broadcast took place on Halloween Eve. Everything else needs a bit of explanation.

By October 30, 1938, what was scaring people in this country was the looming threat of war in Europe. Americans were slowly becoming accustomed to war-related news bulletins breaking into their normal staple of radio dramas, sitcoms, and variety shows. But as much as listeners might have found those bulletins frightening, some listeners found them downright scary.

Those listeners were the owners of America’s newspapers.

As Europe marched to war, radio news filled the gap between the morning and afternoon papers, and between the afternoon dailies and the next morning’s editions. “We interrupt this program…” was both a source of anxiety and comfort for Americans—the news might be bad, but at least it was up to date.

When Welles adopted the news bulletin format for his telling of War of the Worlds—a format he and writer Howard Koch grappled with for weeks—newspapers were only too happy to report how radio had violated its sacred trust and misled the American people with false news, which the newspapers did by misleading the American people with false news.

W. Joseph Campbell argues as much in his book Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism. “Had there been such a panic,” Campbell wrote about the newspaper descriptions at the time, “the aftermath would persist for days, if not weeks.”

Instead, the story died after two days, without reports of injuries, property destruction, or deaths of a magnitude that would normally accompany a panic of this size.

So where did the news come from?

It was pieced together by the skeleton staffs (no Halloween pun intended) most newspapers maintained on Sunday nights. After all, who made news on Sunday night?

Campbell wrote that what was printed on Monday was a collection of anecdotes lifted from scattered calls to the papers and police stations, or culled from wire service reports. There was little or no hard reporting, no interviewing of witnesses, and no first-hand observations.

As Campbell and others have demonstrated, there was simply no supporting evidence that people who may have felt upset or scared acted on those feelings. As Welles later put it, wearing a sheet and sneaking up behind someone and saying “Boo” on Halloween doesn’t cause the victim to flee in genuine panic.

So where did the panic come from? Checkbooks.

Associate communications professors Jefferson Pooley and Michael J. Socolow, writing in Slate magazine, observed, “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.”

And discredit they did.

“The frightened listeners rushed to the telephone to ask the newspaper whether it was true,” proclaimed Pennsylvania’s Harrisburg Patriot the next day, underscoring the newspaper industry’s assertion that when in doubt the citizenry turned to newspapers for answers (cited in Campbell).

William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal and American offered this ominous prediction: “…[I]f the industry…cannot guard against incidents of this nature…it will not long be free from more drastic forms of censorship than it has yet known.” (cited by Campbell)

Welles was 23 when he broadcast War of the Worlds, and any error he made was more likely the result of youthful ignorance than malice aforethought. Nevertheless, he handed American newspapers the equivalent of a Martian heat ray to aim directly at radio’s heart. If anything, that was his biggest blunder.

Three years later, Welles released Citizen Kane, the story of a reckless newspaper baron—a thinly-veiled William Randolph Hearst—who blatantly manipulated the news and, through it, the hearts and minds of the people. The film cemented Welles’ reputation as a pioneering filmmaker and a larger-than-life figure in American folklore. Meanwhile, a defanged Hearst was in the midst of selling off his vast holdings as his empire crumbled around him.

Did Welles get the last laugh? I’m not sure.

I wonder what a Martian would think.