Thursday, October 30, 2025

“I had conceived the idea of doing a radio broadcast in such a manner that a crisis would actually seem to be happening… and would be broadcast in such a dramatized form as to appear to be a real event taking place at that time, rather than a mere radio play.”
– Orson Welles –

As a child, I went through a phase when I was mildly obsessed with Orson Welles radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, broadcast 87 years ago today. Welles proved that the medium truly is the message when his show sparked mass panic – an lesson in how narrative framing can override critical thinking, even among educated audiences. For leaders navigating today’s information-saturated landscape (where deepfakes and AI-generated content make Welles look quaint), the lesson remains urgent: your stakeholders’ perception of reality is shaped not just by facts, but by how those facts are presented, contextualized, and delivered. For more on this historic broadcast, Check out The Infamous “War of the Worlds” Radio Broadcast Was a Magnificent Fluke.

Stay safe. Stay healthy. Be strong. Lead well.

Chad