Luna and the Crumple-Horned Snorkack

[moorequests]

No: HPFGUIDX 84304

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Eric Oppen" <oppen at m...> wrote:
> I'd still like to know why everybody seems so terribly sure that no 
such
> creature as the Crumple-Horned Snorkack exists.  Admittedly, Luna's 
not the
> best person around to convince people of their reality, but 
compared to a
> lot of the really weird critters in _Fantastic Beasts and Where To 
Find
> Them,_ it sounds almost mundane.


  I think maybe it's everyone's reliance upon the printed word and 
media, how when you see something written in books, or on a televised 
news show, it is supposedly looked upon as *fact*. Yes, the WW 
doesn't have television, but they have the Wizarding Wireless 
Network, which we know very little about... so far, all we have been 
told is that it plays music, not news, though. So the W.W. has only 
two sources for news, one of which is regarded largely as a joke, and 
the other one is taken as absolute fact, even though they often 
appear to be lazy (not investigating the real causes of deaths, as in 
what happened to Bode), or in the pocket of the Ministry of Magic. 
(Forwarding the MoM's wish to discredit Harry Potter by playing on 
the assumption that his scar makes him unbalanced and untrustworthy.) 
As a writer, I often struggle with getting people to realize the 
incorrect assumption that if something is in printed media, it is no 
more true than if they wrote it down themselves upon a scrap of 
paper. I got a good kick out of the title of Al Franken's latest 
book, "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them," and the lawsuit Fox 
News brought against him to block it. (The lawsuit was thrown out of 
court.) I summarize this situation in order to explain the lengths 
Fox News would go to in order to block or hinder this book. The legal 
battle between the two also brings to light a wonderful part of our 
world that the wizarding world doesn't have- checks and balances in 
the news and media. Thank goodness for the Quibbler, or perhaps the 
balance would never have begun to turn in Harry's favor at Hogwarts, 
and in the WW in general. 

  Does anyone else wonder if the Quibbler will become more reputable 
because of Harry's interview? I know that the National Enquirer 
sometimes prints stories that surprise everyone and turn out to be 
true. I believe they first broke the story about Rush Limbaugh's drug 
addiction, exposing quite a bit of hypocrisy there. But from what I 
can infer from OotP about The Quibbler, I think perhaps it is better 
paralleled to Weekly World News than National Enquirer. Thoughts?

 -M.M. 

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