Eighty-seven years ago this coming Halloween, a nationwide audience was shocked to hear that Martians were invading the Earth that night and CBS was all over the breaking story:
Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from Intercontinental Radio News.
At 20 minutes before eight, Central time, Prof. Farrell of the Mount Jennings Observatory in Chicago reported several explosions of incandescent gas, occurring at regular intervals on the planet Mars. The spectroscope indicates the gas to be hydrogen and moving towards the earth with enormous velocity....
This was at the beginning of the era of radio news. Americans were just getting accustomed to such immediacy in their lives as the clouds of war gathered over Europe just before Hitler's invasion of Poland.
The program went on to report in great detail the arrival on Earth of a strange metal capsule, the beginning of the Martian invasion.
The startling, realistic reports scared millions of Americans who tuned in late or didn't really listen to the periodic announcements that it was an adaptation of H.G. Wells' 19th century science-fiction novel "War of the Worlds." And that it was being performed by Orson Welles' Mercury Theater on the Air.
Welles, who went on to make the all-time classic movie "Citizen Kane" three years later, was widely excoriated by media afterward for its own gullibility.
Guess what?
A similar thing happened the other day as some culprits on the left willfully took advantage of Donald Trump's unusual absence from dominating news media leading up to a three-day-long holiday weekend to launch and spread an online rumor that he was dead or seriously ill. They wish!
He wasn't, of course. Thank God. And, in fact, the president made fun of media's instant jump on his alleged illness, as opposed to their willful ignorance of Joe Biden's failed medical and mental condition the last few years.
The funniest bit was when one Democrat, stepped on a rake, accusing the administration of not being transparent on the current president's health.
That is the subject of this week's audio commentary, which you can listen to here:
The most recent audio commentary examined President Trump's new policies toward immigration and immigrants and how the subject of newcomers to this country was treated so much differently during my childhood.
The Sunday post this week was another in the ongoing series of my personal memories from growing up in the Heartland and then many decades as a journalist at home and abroad. There were three short chapters: One was on a spry woman in the world's oldest profession seeking entry into the world's second oldest profession. One was on the advice legend, Ann Lander, and what her biggest mistake was.
The third was on a small town story I heard about in Illinois that rang bells and whistles from my childhood elsewhere in the Midwest. And the locals' struggle to overturn some heavy-handed government interference in their daily lives.
Is there any other kind?
