Martians, toilet paper and flu, oh my!
If you don’t think the media is out to fool you, I’ve got a bridge I’d like to sell you
Signy Holmes, Staff
Illustrations By Jessica Koroscil
These are dangerous times we live in. If the avian flu doesn’t get you, the terrorists eventually will. As a matter of fact, your miraculous evasion of SARS, West Nile virus and anthrax means your generous supply of luck has probably already run out. Quick! Arm yourself with duct tape and plastic sheeting, and don’t forget to wash your hands on the way out.
We all know anthrax and SARS have fallen out of favour in the race to scare our pants off. They are the victims of short attention spans, over-coverage and the fact that they have had almost no impact on most of our lives. Of course, there are real problems in this world — far too many of them in fact — but that has never kept us from being enthralled by the far-fetched, the trivial and the downright untrue.
Don’t hog the Charmin
FOX News and the Washington press corps may be feeling the heat as doubts regarding their integrity mount, fuelled by organizations such as FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), who are quick to point out their missteps. But as appealing as Jon Stewart may be, would we ever get so desperate that we’d rely on a talk show host for our fair and balanced news fix?
It appears that this was in fact the case in 1973, when Johnny Carson caused a three-week toilet paper shortage with a single joke gone wrong.
Oil shortages and a devalued American dollar had the public on edge one fateful December night, when Carson’s writers decided to ridicule the situation by including a joke in his monologue on a shortage of toilet paper. But when Carson deadpanned the line: “You know what’s disappearing from the supermarket shelves? Toilet paper. There’s an acute shortage of toilet paper in the United States,” pandemonium resulted.
Around 20 million people saw the show. Many of them probably even got the joke, laughed, or rolled their eyes and went to bed. Many others, however, did not. Perhaps some of them lay in bed all night, staring at the cracks in the ceiling, determined that the hygiene and comfort of their family would not be compromised, determined not to let any toilet paper tycoons get the better of them the way the oil cartel had.
Ridiculous, of course. People just know better than that. Nevertheless, the next morning, a veritable flood of customers descended on supermarkets like locusts, refusing to let anything come between them and their bulk purchases of toilet paper. By noon, many stores had been emptied.
Carson apologized several nights later, explaining that when he made the joke he had been, well, joking — but it was too late. Spurred by empty store shelves, people snatched up any and all toilet paper the moment it became available, scurrying home to stash their prize away.
Videos in stores urging customers to remain calm, courtesy of Scott Paper Towels, were to no avail. There was little that could be done: no store keeps inventory of such a bulky, low-cost item on hand. It didn’t matter that a toilet paper shortage was unnecessary in the first place. It didn’t matter that, in all likelihood, many people had accumulated enough “reserve” toilet paper to build a scale model of the Titanic. What mattered was that the panic button had been hit, and it took three weeks before the shortage ended and normalcy was restored.
The real tragedy, however, is that all those rational citizens who took a joke for what it was were the ones who suffered. They weren’t the ones with a lifetime’s supply of bathroom tissue gleefully stuffed in the spare bedroom. They were the ones who, when they went to get the groceries on Saturday, were perplexed to find row after row of empty shelves where once there was Charmin and Quilted Northern as far as the eye could see.
If there’s a lesson here, it’s a depressing one.
Going too far
Not every case of public hysteria has been so benign or uncalculated. Any attention is good attention in the competitive world of sensationalism. The most famous example of this was the 1938 broadcast of Orson Welles’ radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds, which caused more of a scene than any of Tom Cruise’s antics ever will.
The realistic hour-long radio play was done in the form of news broadcasts proclaiming that Martians had landed in Grovers Mill, New Jersey, of all places. A warning that this was indeed a play was broadcast at the beginning of the program, but most people tuned in later during a musical interlude of a popular show, which ran opposite the radio play.
In 1995, the documentary The Battle Over Citizen Kane examined Welles’ career. It claims that the most frightening portion of the program was carefully timed to coincide with the moment when the most listeners were “surfing” the airwaves. Whether or not this was the case, very few listeners caught the disclaimer. Many took the play at face value, while others misinterpreted the reports as an attack by the Germans, leading to panic around the country.
The exact magnitude of this panic will never be known for sure, because if there’s one thing the media is better at than making the public nervous, it’s exaggerating how nervous the public has been made.
Cynical? Sure. It would be nothing short of shameful for the media to exploit the damage done by one of their own. But that didn’t keep the newspapers from publishing heavily embellished stories the next day — stories of suicides, heart attacks and mass flights from the imagined invasion.
It doesn’t stop there, either. A slightly adapted version of the play was broadcast in 1944 in Chile, with serious consequences. In response to the broadcast’s false reports, the governor of one province mobilized troops and artillery to fend off the “attack,” and many citizens fled their homes or barricaded themselves inside.
Lesson learned, right? Wrong. In 1949, the director of Radio Quito in Ecuador pushed the envelope even further when regular programming was interrupted by a “news bulletin.” Actors impersonating the mayor and a government minister made dramatic announcements instructing the women and children to go into hiding so the men could defend the city. Dead and wounded were reported. Tens of thousands of people mobbed the streets in a panic.
Hearing the noise outside, Radio Quito realized that things had gone too far and admitted to the hoax on-air. The angry crowd turned on them, rioting and setting gasoline fires in the building, killing at least 15 people.
This was the last incident involving The War of the Worlds, but it remains a popular choice for radio stations to broadcast at Halloween. Current regulations make a similar incident today unlikely, but media reports of killer flu pandemics and increased terror alerts may seem less reliable given this evidence of the media’s penchant for drama.
These radio broadcasts may have been unethical and, in the end, deadly, but there have been numerous examples of blatant hoaxes in the media where the result was mass confusion or delusion rather than pandemonium.
Serve homegrown pasta when the moon men visit
We’ve all seen the headlines in the supermarket tabloids proclaiming that Jesus has returned, only to be abducted by the very same aliens who gifted the world’s fattest Siamese twins with their amazing psychic powers. We expect these, and we may even laugh at them as we try not to cry at the thought that somewhere, somehow, people are taking these things seriously.
What many of us don’t know is that many hoaxes have had far more respected hosts. The British news show Panorama, which aired on the BBC, decided to play an April Fool’s joke on its viewers in 1957 by showing a segment on the particularly fine spaghetti harvest Switzerland was expecting that year.
“The spaghetti harvest here in Switzerland is not, of course, carried out on anything like the tremendous scale of the Italian industry,” the show’s anchor explained in a tone of utter seriousness to the audience as they watched clips of Swiss farmers picking pasta off trees and placing it in baskets.
The program went on in great detail, as the anchor took the viewers on a true journey of discovery. He explained many of the peculiarities of the spaghetti harvest: for instance, how do they get the spaghetti to grow to uniform lengths?
“This is the result of many years of patient endeavour by past breeders who succeeded in producing the perfect spaghetti,” of course. “For those who love this dish, there’s nothing like real, home-grown spaghetti,” the anchor concluded.
There was a lot more trust in television in those days than there is today, and the respect most people had for the show and its anchor contributed to a widespread puzzlement over the origin of spaghetti. The BBC was soon fielding hundreds of calls from viewers.
Some were calls from people wanting to know if what they had just seen was really true, while other, more innocent viewers wanted to know how they might grow their own spaghetti tree. There are reports that the BBC’s answer to this one was to “. . . place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.”
Hoaxes can also serve to build reputations and reader interest. Way back in the days of yore, when today’s age of information would have been utterly unimaginable, there was no real way for the public to know whether what they read or heard was true.
The year was 1835. The newspaper in question was the New York Sun. The fabulous story that built the Sun into the newspaper boasting one of the largest circulations in the world was the alleged sighting of unicorns, quartz pyramids and winged, furry batmen on the moon.
The series of six articles, which the Sun claimed were based on sightings through a telescope, told a fantastic tale of rich and exotic life forms on the moon. Though no one had ever seen any evidence of life on the moon of any sort, Sir John Herschel, the alleged discoverer, was somehow able to make out detailed features of the moonscape.
These details were not limited in any way by reason or reality, as the articles described the shapes of alien feet and made claims about things as precise as the texture of extraterrestrial hair that would confound NASA’s most delicate instruments even today.
“The circumstance of this [wing] membrane . . . continued from the shoulders to the legs, united all the way down, though gradually decreasing in width,” insisted one article, with blatant disregard for the realm of possibility or the sheer magnitude of the distances involved.
Then again, if you’re going to publish lies about golden Temples of the Moon, primitive tribes of hut-dwelling, fire-wielding beavers who walk on their hind legs, and moon-bison, there’s certainly no reason to balk at exaggerating what could be seen through a portable telescope.
That was then
It could be argued that the Sun’s increased sales were based on reader amusement rather than reader stupidity. What else could possibly explain the popularity of modern-day phenomena like “reality” TV, if not the entertainment factor? Surely no one believes any of that nonsense.
Indeed, with such a storied history to “the truth,” it’s a wonder any of us believe anything we see or hear. Of course, we can take comfort in the fact that most of these incidents occurred in a simpler time, to a less media-savvy generation.
We’ve been exposed to the media’s tireless manipulations since the commercial breaks in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Rocket Robin Hood — perhaps we just aren’t that gullible anymore. Any attempt by the media to make us panic is, quite simply, doomed to fail.
All the same, I noticed you sniffling once or twice while you were reading, I wonder if you wouldn’t mind standing back a bit. I mean, it’s not like I’m worried about the flu or anything. That would just be ridiculous. But I’d still like you to stand further off. Just to be safe.
