Thursday Thread Day: Harry Potter Vs The MSM
J.K. Rowling's suspicion of government and the mainstream media was a breath of fresh air in the Harry Potter novels.
Robby Soave has a piece up at Reason on J.K. Rowling’s government and media skepticism in the Harry Potter books, something I remember well even though it’s been a number of years since I read the fantasy series.
Scroll to the bottom for the discussion prompt…
Earlier on in the novels, the media—embodied by Rita Skeeter—takes on something of a tabloid role, with The Daily Prophet publishing lurid takes on Harry and Hermione’s supposed romance, misquoting Harry and so forth. And then things get worse.
But this is the least of The Daily Prophet's appalling failures. In the fifth book and film, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the newspaper sides with the government, openly aiding the Ministry of Magic's efforts to paint Harry and his mentor, Hogwarts Headmaster Albus Dumbledore, as lunatics and conspiracy theorists. Harry and his friends know that the dangerous dark wizard Voldemort has returned, but the truth is inconvenient for the Ministry, and thus the media does everything it can to paint Harry as deranged. Sample headlines include, "Harry Potter: The Boy Who Lied?" and "Dumbledore: Is He Daft or Is He Dangerous?"
From there, the Prophet goes full fascist, explicitly and relentlessly siding with Voldemort, while The Quibbler—a small indie paper with a shoddy track record, run by Luna Lovegood’s father, Xenophilius—is the only place where the actual truth can be found.
Like Soave, I remember more of Rowling’s government skepticism than her media parodies, but they both resonate today. Of course, she was informed at the time by the Iraq War and the failure of both governments and the press to do due diligence at the time. Now the press, which is at times indistinguishable from activist groups on the left and the right, has given Rowling other reasons to be skeptical.
Of course, now we also have social media—something blissfully absent from Harry Potter’s world. Simpler times, Harry. Simpler times.
All of which leads me to the topic for this Thursday’s thread: Media skepticism.
I’ve found myself growing increasingly skeptical over the years. We had one of the most notorious liars who ever sat in the Oval Office as president for four years, but the press’s hatred for Trump led them to repeat and spread all manner of nonsense themselves, and now it’s all just par for the course. Fake news? It’s everywhere! Even in the Wizarding World!
I have trust issues, I guess. I never trusted government, but I always sort of hoped journalism would rise to the occasion. It seems I was wrong.
So the questions are:
Has journalism been subsumed by ideology?
Is there any path back toward something that better resembles a more objective, fact-based news media?
Am I overthinking this and exaggerating how bad things have gotten?
What sayest thou, oh droogies of mine?
Well, what do the numbers say? I want to refer to Table 4 in https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1077699018778242#
The article is about demographic surveys of American journalists 1970-2013. Table 4 is about political affiliation. The key statistics: % of journalists that identify as Republican move from 25% in 1971 to just over 7% in 2013, in a rather steady decline. The % of journalists that identify as Democrat starts at 35 in 1971, peaks at 44 in 92, then declines back to just ~28 in 2013. So in 2013 Democratic journalists outnumber Republicans 4-to-1, while in 1971 they were nearly equal. The next step would be to figure out whether this is the result of more liberal-leaning publications starting up or of some kind of change within existing news organizations.
I realize this is not very helpful, but it's a start and this is what can be said while referring to objective data. Another interesting note is that the fraction of journalists identifying as Independent also happened to rise significantly in 2013.
I will be back later when I have time to find some more statistics.