War of the Worlds example

In 1938, Orson Welles started a radio broadcast segment which featured the storytelling of the book War of the Worlds. Due to scheduling issues and the way in which the story was told (like an actual news segment) many of the audience who listened believed that what they were listening to was fact, not fiction. This created panic throughout the country as people genuinely thought an invasion was happening. This is an example of a passive audience which links to Stuart Hall's reception theory. The theory talks to this idea that the producer encodes messages for the audience to decode which in some cases is not always decoded in the way the producer originally intended. This example also links to the hypodermic needle theory which creates this concept that the audience are simply being injected with information and accepting it for what it is with no opposition. Due to the high panic; the police received many complaints even from people who hadn't even listened to the broadcast but had seen newspapers reporting the situation which links to the two-step flow theory. As this happened just before the breakout of the second World War, people were already waiting in anticipation for an invasion and some even believed the broadcast was linking to a German invasion instead of an alien invasion. This shows that the audience wasn't always passive and did negotiate the meaning that was encoded in the story. This also links back to Stuart Hall's reception theory.