Of course we had people queuing just for the opportunity to tell a TV crew that they didn't trust politicians, but in the first few days there was another most curious group of vox-pops: people who knew that the line of credit advanced to NR by the Bank of England was sufficient to cover all their deposits, but who were nonetheless taking their money out to put it in a bank which didn't have that guarantee. Strange. Scary.

As for whether a practical joke like Welles' broadcast could happen today: it does, all the time. People believe that manipulated-reality TV portrays reality, don't they? The reason a large-scale panic won't happen is not because it couldn't, but because the networks know they couldn't afford the ensuing lawsuits....

One thing I found interesting in reading the source material (I've always been fascinated by this event) was that people who heard the broadcast in groups were more likely to realize it was a fake; those in smaller groups, or alone, were more likely to panic.

To me it shows an age-old bit of wisdom: that people who are able to put their heads together with others deal with a crisis more sensibly.

Now, as to the blog's thesis--could this happen again now?

I think not. We are too accustomed to tuning in to many sources for news, especially crisis news. Of course, if all the news is fixed, then our increasingly unsocial society may have a problem.

That's the whole point of this guy's blog. He wants to say that Bush got us into Iraq the same way Orson Wells got people to buy train tickets away from NY.

What he ignores, however, is that super majorities of both houses of congress, in possession of all the available evidence, also backed the war.

He is another Bush hater who wants to equate Bush with every unsavory character in history. First Hitler, then Nixon, now, apparently, Orson Wells.

No intelligent person would buy his thesis. Apparently he's appealing to the under-100 IQ crowd. Anyway, he'll only get about half of them. Fox News has the other half bottled up.