Does Harry Potter have a drinking problem, or does he just hate journalism? (News Round-up)
Jeffrey Van Camp
Click to view the whole page from the Victoria Prophet
Even though I didn’t care much for Half-Blood Prince, I find myself looking up Harry Potter news nonetheless. To my surprise, even though HBP opened a couple weeks ago, there are some new stories about it floating around. Here are a couple good ones.
Some parents think Harry Potter, and everyone at Hogwarts, may have a drinking problem. They may have a point. The recent movie had a lot of drinking and partying. We’re never quite sure what’s in butterbeer either, but when Hermoine drinks it, she acts a bit drunk. Ginny ends up making out with a boy at the pub; was this a alcohol induced hookup?
As Harry Potter fans crowd movie theaters to catch the latest installment in the blockbuster series, parents may be surprised by the starring role given to alcohol. In scene after scene, the young wizards and their adult professors are seen sipping, gulping and pouring various forms of alcohol to calm their nerves, fortify their courage or comfort their sorrows.
…Liz Perle, a mother of two teenage boys and the editor in chief of Common Sense Media, which reviews books, movies and Web content aimed at children, said she was bothered by so many scenes showing alcohol as a coping mechanism.
“Hermione is such a tightly wound young lady, but she’s liberated by some butterbeer,” she said. “The message is that it gives you liquid courage to put your arms around the guy you really like but are afraid to.” - NY Times
It’s true. If butterbeer is like actual beer, I have long known it’s liquid courage properties. The problem is that you need so much of it that you’re a drunken fool by the time you spring into action. Even with such magic everywhere, it doesn’t look like butterbeer has fixed this problem. In any case, no one seems to be asking them to change the movie or banning the movie or any crazy action we’ve come to expect. They merely think it’s a good opportunity to talk to your kids about alcohol, and I agree. It’s good stuff, but the kiddies get carried away. Wait until college, young Frank-The-Tanks.
Does the Harry Potter series negatively portraying Journalism? And if so, is that going to leave millions of youth disillusioned about the career? I think we’ll live, but a research study from Baylor University doesn’t.
The analysis finds an overwhelmingly negative representation of journalism throughout the first six books, raising concerns that child readers will view journalism as corrupt, deceptive and an unattractive career choice.
“The books present an unnecessarily pessimistic view of journalism today,” says Dr. Amanda Sturgill, senior lecturer in journalism at Baylor and one of the study co-authors. “Since literature can play an important role in helping children learn and possibly empathize with situations experienced by the characters, the potential for influence on journalism is strong.” - Baylor University
Baylor looked through the first six books and picked out all mentionings of newspapers or news or journalism. They found that The Daily Prophet, which I assume is the only paper in the books, often misleads its readers, has questionable ties with the government, and gathers information unethically. The study cites one particular character, Rita Skeeter, who has a magic quill pen write her stories down for her, but it often exaggerates and embellishes, turning a bland story into something fantastical.
The study points out that Rita Skeeter - the prominent but “corrupt journalist who writes with a complete disregard for accuracy, truthfulness and objectivity” - often conducts interviews with a “Quick Notes Quill,” a magical quill that writes automatically as the subject speaks. However, the quill does not record verbatim what the subject says. Instead, it takes a subject’s words and creates sensational and inaccurate tales that bear little resemblance to actual events, the study says.
Overall, the study finds that there is little regard for accuracy in any form and there are no consequences or accountability for poor journalistic practices.
“In no situations was there recourse on The Daily Prophet or the Ministry of Magic for what was published,” Sturgill says. “This could convey the message to young readers that there are no ill effects of poor journalism in the real world.” - Baylor University
To verify these claims I called my little sister Jaclyn and my mother Susan, who are two of the biggest Harry Potter fans I know. They’ve read all of the books many times. Both agreed that it’s not a big deal.
“It’s set in a different world,” said Jaclyn. “I think the Journalism stuff was mostly supposed to show how the dark forces were taking over everything, including the news. There was one magazine that printed good stuff about Harry too. It’s a magical world in a fiction book. I never took it its representation of anything too seriously.”
And there you have it. That’s one youth who still thinks journalism can be uncorrupt, though she doesn’t understand why the pictures on the newspaper don’t move.
One Harry Potter fan is trying to mobilize fans to do good. Andrew Slack has started the Harry Potter Alliance, which gets Potter fans involved in charitable activities like “worker’s rights and combating genocide.”
Slack relates all sorts of social issues back to themes in the Harry Potter books. Using the opinions of Harry’s mentor Albus Dumbledore as a moral compass, Slack suggests Potter fans should fight prison torture because Dumbledore was against Dementors and that they should be pro-fair trade because Dumbledore agreed with Potter friend Hermione Granger on giving rights to house elves. - Los Angeles Times
The Alliance registers new voters, and has drives to collect used books (13,000 of them) to give to local communities. They also raised $15,000 to help people displaced by the horrible genocide in Darfur. Andrew Slack also runs a site called WhatWouldDumbledoreDo.org. Check it out.
Finally, for those interested in a couple movie spoilers, here is an article that lists all the great scenes from the book Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince that were missing in the movie. A couple of these are pretty good.
Reader Comments (1)
I'm famous! :)
Her name is "Ginny", by the way. I only correct these things so you are not vilified by manic HP fans.
Good article. I do think the people at Baylor had a point. In the first few books, the Daily Prophet was the most reliable and honest news source (and the only wizards newspaper, as far as I know). However the Prophet was taken over multiple times - first by the Ministry of Magic in the fifth book, which printed nothing but crazy allegations against Harry and Dumbledore, because the Minister did not want to believe that Voldemort had returned. The Prophet started printing the truth after everybody discovered that Harry & Dumbledore WEREN'T lying. Later on, in the final book, the Prophet is taken over yet again, this time by Voldemort's followers, and it avoids printing the truth about what they are doing and the murders that are being committed, and instead tries to turn the world against Harry Potter by making wild claims that he killed Dumbledore and calling him "Undesirable No. 1". It was all a means to show how every aspect of their lives were being affected by the dark forces trying to take over. Even their local newspaper.
Furthermore, not everybody was on board with Voldemort's new regime, and I guess they were attempting to lure people in by printing false stories intended to make them sympathize with Vodelmort's movement, and share in the collective hatred of Harry Potter. Harry's friends and supporters didn't believe a word of this, and his enemies of course, ate it up. It showed who the true strong characters were, and who the weaker, easily convinced ones were as well. I don't think it was necessarily bashing journalism, or whatever, but showing who Harry's true friends were, I guess. It's not so much who's writing it, or even what's being written, it's whether you have the personal conviction not to go with the flow and not to believe what everybody else believes - you've got to have your own voice, and stand up for your opinion, even if it's not a popular one.
And certainly Rita Skeeter's crazy antics are part of it... She'll do anything to sell her books or make her articles more popular. It's all about personal gain. She's described as a very flashy and overbearing woman in the books, and indeed, her "Quick Quotes Quill" turns the blithest interviews into sensational and controversial stories. (spoiler, I guess) - She uses some very questionable magical methods in the last book to gain information to write her biography on Dumbledore. Rita Skeeter is greedy and often unethical, but her stories sold like hot cakes and her readers were very devoted to her, so she never took a moment to consider that what she was doing was wrong, as long as it got her the story, and the money. Perhaps this was a reflection or a statement about the the journalism field as a whole, I don't know.
There was another publication that printed the truth about Harry when nobody else would - that magazine I mentioned... It's called "The Quibbler" and it's run by the father of Harry's eccentric friend, Luna Lovegood. Nobody took The Quibbler seriously, because it was just a magazine full of "rubbish" about exotic animals that didn't really exist and how to get read of something called a wrackspurt and all the other weird stuff Luna always talked about - but in Harry's fifth year, when everybody was reading the Prophet and believing it's libel, Harry gave an interview to The Quibbler and it became the only magazine to print the truth about him and the return of Voldemort. In later years, when the Prophet was taken over yet again, it would be the sole news source that printed the truth and told readers to keep supporting Harry, and doing whatever they could to stop Voldemort. So that's one very positive representation of brave and honest journalism right there.
Wow. I'm sorry this is so long, haha. That's ridiculous...