An Economic System With Values

"It is important that Europe fight for its ideas and values to help
bring back confidence. We want capitalism based on entrepreneurs
and not speculators. We want morality and transparency. The world
needs Europe to show its stability." Oct. 08

Nicolas Sarkozy, President of France




"October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in
stocks. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May,
March, June, December, August, and February."

Mark Twain
1835-1910

Worldwide Web of . . . . Martian Reports?

“Martians have landed and are quickly making their way to the capital!”

Is this true? Why of course not.

But people heard it and perceived as as a threat.

The October 1938 version of “War of the Worlds” is the classic. Another occasion was February 12, 1949, the eve that martians were said to have landed in Ecuador, as dramatized on Radio Quito. The panicked response of listeners paralleled that of nearly 11 years earlier on the Columbia radio network.

In the Ecuador episode, the Martians’ initial assault occurred at Latacunga, with the deadly sweep northward to Quito and Cotocollao, near the international airport. With growing panic in the streets, the actors at Radio Quito revealed the truth. Fear turned to anger which turned into a riot outside the building that housed the radio station and El Comercio newspaper. That night, the facilities were burned down, resulting in several deaths. Those who had authored the radio production fled the country.

Radio was relatively young and its power to inform, entertain and motivate listeners was still being discovered. In the 1940s, the martian takeover had also played out in Chile.

Consider the Internet today. Stories of foreboding still work, but in different venues, with different results. I-phone guru Steve Jobs was hospitalized with chest pains – or at least that was the report on CNN’s Ireport.

Apple stock dropped below its traditional price floor of $100, but recovered as the "news" was corrected. When Jobs gave a press conference to the traditional media, a big, bold banner behind him read, “The rumors of my death are highly exaggerated.”

Our modern population might be too sophisticated for panic at the sound of a field reporter’s last gasps of life as martian gasses asphyxiate him. But we’re not always saavy enough to determine the truth or error of today’s citizen journalists.

Collaborative efforts provide some notably good results, but damaging reports will still filter in. In his October 3 column, John C. Dvorak said of inaccuracies, disinformation and hoaxes we see with citizen journalism, “It’s like a bad forest fire: it can be contained but not controlled.”

He wrote that citizen journalists would be heavily criticized for false report on Jobs, but that we all need to “get over it. We’re stuck with what we have.” We have a world of information. Consume with care.

Xavier Almeida of Radio Quito wishes such a dramatization were possible again. Take a few minutes to listen to this 1998 interview and hear his description of the events of February 12, 1949.



An avid shortwave radio listener, Don Moore discovered the story about Radio Quito's version of War of the Worlds while at a university library in Michigan, USA. Listen to Don in this telephone interview.

Historic photo used with permission of El Comercio

Read the News and Look for Reasons to Smile

A different tack now, on news of the growing financial crisis.

Does a broadcast announcer ever get the giggles when talking about the “footsie 100” of Britain’s markets?

I used to work in radio news. Several years ago I queried my co-workers

on pronouncing the the Nikkei in Japan’s markets and came up varied different answers , with "NEE keh" winning out.

Amid reports of all the suffering of last spring’s Sichuan earthquake in China, why would a moment of amusement brighten my emotions as I read? Very simply, I liked the wordplay as a reporter's favorites -- “who” and “when” -- appeared quite literally in the story. President Hu Jintao urged all out rescue efforts, even as Premier Wen Jiabao was traveling to devastated Sichuan province.

As a “Ralph”, I am slow to poke fun of people’s names, for mine is no easy handle. Thankfully, it is much shorter than the one time foreign minister of Qatar – Sheikh Hamad bin Jassin bin Jabr al-Thani. As far as I can tell, he only got the “Sheikh” tacked onto his name. Micahel Zammit Cutajar worked harder at giving a radio announcer a fractured jaw, getting appointed as the (take a breath and then say it) Executive Secretary of the Secretariat of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. Whew!

I logged a lot of hours editing Reuters newspaper reports to use as broadcast copy, and so little amusements quietly crept in. Did anyone else’s mind replay old “Smash!” and “Pow!” scenes from Batman when encountering the name, Susilo Bambang Yodhoyono, of Indonesia? Maybe just me.

Is there really religious teaching about “Our Lady of Unraveling Knots”?

What novelist would tag a Philippines Archbishop with the surname of Sin?

Life’s Author, that's who.

Life can be a “who’s on first?” comedy, ala Abbott and Costello routine. Or a tragedy of “I don’t know” even how to take up the first thread of string to try to unravel a knot. An unexpected death, great loss in a natural disaster, or a stock market slide that seems to not have found a bottom.

All make a lot more sense when we call on the Name that holds no irony, needs no earthly intermediary and bears nothing but goodwill and grace for us.