The new pre-epilogue

[sunnyskywalker]

Excerpt here.

Maybe Pottermore members can fill us on on what's in the rest of "Rita's" article?

I have to wonder what they have added to the wizarding world's water supply. Remember how wizards used to be fickle creatures, capable of going from hero-worship to deep suspicion and hatred based on a few gossip columns or rumors in the halls? No longer!

As the crowd stampeded, tents were flattened and small children mown down. Fans from all corners of the globe stormed towards the area where members of Dumbledore’s Army were rumoured to have been sighted, desperate above all else for a glimpse of the man they still call the Chosen One.

Since Harry is about to turn 34, this is roughly 16 years after the DA did its thing. That they're still famous for being the DA, and Auroring and whatever else is clearly a distant, secondary consideration, suggests that they haven't really done anything all that newsworthy lately. (I would bet on the cut being from a game of pickup Quidditch with Ron & co. or something equally boring.) Yet they're excited enough to see Harry that Rita can spin it into a stampede?

There must have been nothing happening at all in the WW for the last 16 years. I guess they really do disappear when Rowling isn't looking.

Comments

[dracasadiablo.livejournal.com]

Why would WW need libel/slander laws?
"Daily Prophet" had a joint Ginny and Rita article on the Cup finale. Ginny was covering the game and Rita was lookign at the VIP box and, well, commenting on former DA (and families) in classic Rita way.
Somehow Ginny was able to watch the game, write her part of the article and read what Rita was writing all at the same time. So, in the end Ginny hexed her (we aren't told what hex it was) so much that Rita was unable to write more or recover in time the article come out.

In WW there's no reason to bother with law case when you can just put people in hospital and not be punished for it.

[vermouth1991.livejournal.com]

But @oneandthetruth, the character of Freddie Lounds (in the original book Red Dragon he's a male tabloid journalist and in the TV series a gender-flipped blogger) keeps getting taken down a peg in the stories, even though he/she makes big money writing exploitive and mostly untrue material. In the book he threatened to foil the FBI's plan unless he gets in the investigation and writes a piece, an inter-state transmission of a threatening message which the FBI totally recorded down in case they needed to burn him, since in such a case even the 1st Amendment won't be saving him. What I'm trying to say is that both Skeeter and Lounds had done damage to their reputations as a journalist that no one in their right mind ought to believe them anymore. But they just booody do.

[oneandthetruth.livejournal.com]

both Skeeter and Lounds had done damage to their reputations as a journalist that no one in their right mind ought to believe them anymore. But they just booody do.

That makes sense if you're talking about an open society with a variety of news sources, but it's easily rebutted with an example from current news about the Malaysian airliner that was shot down.

I watch a lot of political talk shows. Recently I've seen several conversations like this:

Talking Head 1: In Russia, the news media are saying the plane wasn't an airliner, it was a spy plane. They're saying a lot of the people were already dead when the plane took off, which is why some of the bodies were naked when they were discovered.*

TH 2: But that's crazy! Surely the Russian people wouldn't believe anything so ridiculous.

TH 1: Yeah, they would, because the government controls all the news media in Russia. So the people only hear what the government wants them to hear, and they never hear information that conflicts with what the government is saying.

Now, I realize the British WW does not have government-run media, but it is a closed society with only a few news outlets. So it's reasonable for people to assume that if Rita Skeeter has been able to write whatever she wants for years and years, it must be reasonably close to the truth, or she would be either reined in by her bosses or fired.

*When I first heard this, I immediately thought the Russian media must have seen the first episode of that new TV show, The Strain, and were ripping it off. It involves a plane full of dead people that lands at JFK Airport. They were killed by a super vampire that was hidden in the cargo hold and was being shipped in so some dying billionaire could have eternal life. 'Cause what's a few hundred innocent dead people, and the possibility of an epidemic of super-vampire virus infecting one of the world's biggest cities, matter when an old rich guy's life is at stake? (no pun intended)

[oneandthetruth.livejournal.com]

Well, dracasdiablo, Ginny obviously didn't do a good job of controlling Rita if she let that vile libel about her brother possibly being a kidnapper and rapist get by her. I'm sure Ginny wouldn't care about Fleur being trashed, but you'd think she wouldn't want Bill to be insulted.

BTW, I didn't know Ginny was watching Rita write her article. It doesn't say that in the OP, and the excerpt I read didn't mention that.

You have a good point about lawsuits not being necessary when you can assault people and get away with it. Yet they consider themselves more civilized than non-magical people.