Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you’re drastically underestimating how many people would assume it was true
Sunday, October 30, 1938
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds_(1938_ra...
> The response may have reflected newspaper publishers' fears that radio, to which they had lost some of the advertising revenue that was scarce enough during the Great Depression, would render them obsolete. In "The War of the Worlds", they saw an opportunity to cast aspersions on the newer medium: "The nation as a whole continues to face the danger of incomplete, misunderstood news over a medium which has yet to prove that it is competent to perform the news job," wrote Editor & Publisher, the newspaper industry's trade journal.[2][55]
> William Randolph Hearst's papers called on broadcasters to police themselves, lest the government step in, as Iowa Senator Clyde L. Herring proposed a bill that would have required all programming to be reviewed by the FCC prior to broadcast (he never actually introduced it).
And we all know Hearst would have no incentive to gin up something to make radio look bad and newspapers look better.
> Few contemporary accounts exist outside newspaper coverage of the mass panic and hysteria supposedly induced by the broadcast. Justin Levine, a producer at KFI in Los Angeles, wrote in a 2000 history of the FCC's response to hoax broadcasts that "the anecdotal nature of such reporting makes it difficult to objectively assess the true extent and intensity of the panic.[56] Bartholomew sees this as yet more evidence that the panic was predominantly a creation of the newspaper industry.[57]