One of the ever present and yet more secondary aspects of the Harry Potter series is the wizarding newspaper, The Daily Prophet, and the reporters who work for it such as Rita Skeeter. However, the stories printed in the Prophet, and the character of the journalists working for this paper, are often the greatest source of irritation for me when reading the books. It is not only the fact that the newspaper often prints articles that the reader knows are false or embellished, it is the fact that so many subscribers believe these stories that galls. For instance, in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix when the government and the newspaper have turned against Harry and write stories into which they occasionally slip in phrases like “a tale worthy of Harry Potter” and “let’s hope he [whoever is injured in the report] doesn’t have a scar on his forehead or we’ll be asked to worship him next.” These stories come out in which Harry is made to look like a villain because of an occurrence that happened when he was a baby and his parents were killed and he himself almost died, and people believe it. It’s hard to fathom anyone taking sides against a boy for something completely beyond his control and that took away the only family he would ever have, but never be able to know; and yet people do in the book.
Another particularly annoying aspect of the Prophet is a certain staff member on payroll there, Rita Skeeter. The reader of the HP series is first introduced to Skeeter in the fourth book when she is sent to Hogwarts to report on the Triwizard tournament. From the very start the reader is aware that her methods of obtaining her stories, as well as the content of the articles themselves are very suspect. Even as Rita is interviewing Harry for the first time both the reader and Harry read that her Quick-Quotes Quill is jotting down a tale far different than the one Harry is actually telling her. Even though the content of Rita Skeeter’s articles is quite suspect, her readers, even those who know Harry personally such as Mrs. Weasley, buy into her fabrications. But this particular habit of stretching the truth when it comes to Harry’s life is not the real reason that I loathe Rita Skeeter. No, it is her articles on Hagrid and Dumbledore in books four and seven respectively that make me boil with rage every time I see her name on the paper.
During the time that Rita Skeeter is at Hogwarts, she becomes friendly with the Slytherins who are only too willing to give her a story, even if it is false. For example, the piece Rita Skeeter writes about Hagrid being a terrifying and bloodthirsty half-giant teacher menacing his students has only two true facts in it. Hagrid is a half-giant and he teaches at Hogwarts. Other than that the story is completely ridiculous, as anyone who actually knows Hagrid can attest to the fact that he is a very kind and gentle person. Rita Skeeter displays the same bigotry and lack of decency towards Hagrid that Dolores Umbridge does in book five when she conducts her “evaluation” of him. I put the word evaluation in quotation marks because I really feel that Umbridge’s assessment of Hagrid’s teaching was merely an exercise of cruelty and prejudice against someone different than herself. In my mind, Rita Skeeter printing her article about Hagrid is no different than Umbridge, and they both make me sick when I read about them and their intolerant ways. Even knowing the fact that Rita Skeeter had to stop reporting for a time because Hermione threatened to tell the Ministry of Magic that she was an unregistered Animagus and that she wrote the article of Harry’s story about fighting Voldemort, I have no sympathy for her, especially when she takes advantage of the fact that the Ministry is fighting a battle against Voldemort and trying to prevent innocent people from dying to go back to reporting because she thinks that they won’t have time to worry about an unregistered Animagus. Rita Skeeter plays on the fact that the Ministry is too busy preventing more deaths from occurring to worry about her, which if you ask me, is pretty unconscionable of her. But then Rita Skeeter isn’t really decent person at all in my opinion. And The Daily Prophet flips back and forth so often between supporting Harry and calling him a liar that the reader shouldn’t put much stock in what it says, even if the sometimes misguided subscribers do in the text.
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