The April Fools' joke about the Swiss spaghetti tress was first made by BBC in England in 1957. Afterwards they got calls from people asking for advise on how to grow such a tree.
It was later "borrowed" by Danish news. Afterwards they started getting calls from annoyed wives who knew spaghetti was made from flour because it said so on the packaging, but their husbands wouldn't believe them because why would the news lie?
The thing about the mass-panic caused by the realistic-sounding radio show is... it didn't actually happen. The real hoax was on the part of the newspapers reporting on it. See, at the time, Radio was kind of a new-ish medium for news and entertainment, and the well-established newspapers were seeing drops in their profits. They wanted Radio gone, and were eager to discredit it, even convince people radio was "dangerous" and should be abolished. (Not that similar conflict didn't happen a couple decades later between radio and TV).
@Hinoron I think i heard of this somehwere alredy, but now i'll remember it . It reminds me of how the nowadays "old" mediums, the TV, the radio and the newspapers trying to demonize the youtube and the online content creators, because they are afraid to lose their power, viewers and money.
@csizmawarrior
I think the start of TV losing all their money and power was really when they started offering 1500 channels (though for sure streaming services kicked it the rest of the way down the stairs). It devalued all their advertising. 25 years earlier, when there were only 15 or so channels, you could buy a TV commercial slot and have a reasonable expectation that ##,000 people would see it. Buy a slot on one channel at one time now, on one of those 1500 channels, and only a small fraction of as many people will see it. It becomes much less worth it to advertise on TV at all! Advertising is the main source of TV funding, so that has been a critical problem that has even shut down some networks.
@Hinoron i see. Indeed it explainst it, when an ad block on a TV channel started we just switched channel too to another when we watched TV like 5 years ago or so. Elders still watch TV and wait the commercials so i think the advertising switched to their age as well somewhat, and it can stay alive a bit more, but TV doesn't have as much power as it had, say, 15-20 years ago.
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