Michael J. Socolow (born December 19, 1968) is an American media historian and former broadcast journalist who teaches in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the University of Maine.
[6] Socolow has written op-eds, essays, and commentary for the New York Times,[7] Washington Post,[8] Boston Globe,[9] Chicago Tribune, Slate,[10] Politico,[11] The Conversation, and numerous other publications.
Socolow, often working in collaboration with Jefferson Pooley, has written several articles (both scholarly and popular) dispelling the myth of The War of the Worlds (1938 radio drama) mass panic.
[12] Their collaborative work argues that the panic was "almost non-existent" and significantly overstated by contemporaneous sensational press reporting, and, later, in academic scholarship.
[13] Yet Pooley and Socolow's scholarship has been cited by Snopes,[14] Time,[15] National Geographic,[16] and others to dispel the "War of the Worlds," mass panic myth.