by Patrick Reardon
The magical thing about the final installment of Harry Potter is not so much the tale itself, but the way the news media handled its release.
While copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows were in circulation for days before publication, the media never revealed the ending.
Normally, the imperative of the public's right to know anything trumps everything else in journalism. But the rush to be first with news doesn't leave much room for consideration of whether a particular revelation is the sort of news that the public must know.
This isn't the way it has always been. The famous example is Franklin Delano Roosevelt's polio-crippled legs.
But consider how the media would harp on the physical limitations of a candidate today.
For more on these reflections, see the article in today's Perspective section:
HarrWhat would Harry Potter do?
The media held their tongue
on a fictional boy's final chapter.
Let's see that in the real world.
By Patrick T. Reardon
Tribune staff reporter
August 12, 2007
The extraordinary thing about the final Harry Potter book isn't that it has sold umpteen millions of copies. It's that the news media -- traditional and non-traditional, print and digital -- have treated the story with an unusual degree of human decency.
Maybe there's a lesson to be learned.
Although copies of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" were in circulation in the days leading up to its official publication date of July 21, news organizations and individual bloggers, almost unanimously, refused to disclose details of the novel. They didn't reveal the ending. They didn't make public even the usual plot and character bits routinely mentioned in book reviews.
In the weeks since, those same editors and writers have gone to extreme lengths to protect the book's secrets by splashing spoiler alerts prominently on any story that might give the merest whiff of the story's twists and turns.
In thousands of private decisions, writers, editors, publishers and bloggers have determined that they don't want to spoil the book for Harry Potter's fans. Maybe it would have been different if those fans had all been adults. But most are children. And the decision was made, over and over and over, not to break their hearts.
I'm glad. I think that was the right thing to do and a good instinct to follow. The world was better for it.
Normally, journalists aren't so mushy. Normally, the argument that the public has a right to know anything and everything trumps all other considerations. Behind this argument isn't just 1st Amendment pieties. There's also a competitive imperative. The rush to be first with news doesn't leave much room for consideration of whether a particular revelation is the sort of news that the public must know.
Usually, it's not a fictional plot that gets revealed but the real-world details of someone's private life.
This isn't the way it has always been. The famous example is Franklin Delano Roosevelt's polio-crippled legs.
During Roosevelt's four terms as president, news organizations, almost universally, went along with his request not to photograph him in a wheelchair or in a situation in which his disability made him appear helpless. While FDR's bout with polio was known to the public, reporters and editors didn't dwell on his physical limitations.
That wouldn't happen today. But I think it was the right thing to do and a good instinct to follow. The world was certainly better for it.
Consider how the media would harp on the physical limitations of a candidate today. If that sort of grinding, day-after-day coverage had been devoted to Roosevelt's disabilities in the 1930s and 1940s, who knows how the national elections of that era would have turned out? But the thought of the nation facing a lingering Depression with Alf Landon at its head or World War II under President Wendell Willkie is more than a bit scary.
Roosevelt had the right combination of optimism and will to help the country survive the worst economic crisis in its history, and he had the international vision, political deviousness and steely leadership skills to mold the United States into the most militarily powerful nation ever.
But he would have been a different, weaker sort of leader, or no leader at all, if the media had made a big deal of his strengthless legs.
Another famous example of the media turning a blind eye is the way reporters ignored John F. Kennedy's womanizing in the White House in the 1960s.
Kennedy was a lesser chief executive than Roosevelt, although certainly not inconsequential. He grappled with Vietnam, Cuba, the Cold War, the space race and racial injustice during his three years as president. And he would have had a much more difficult time if he also had been dealing with scandals about his private life. Ask Bill Clinton.
The journalistic argument today for revealing such information is that it is indicative of the character of the candidate or public official. I'm afraid, though, that the character issue often is simply an excuse for getting salacious information out because the public seems to want it, for the titillation value. Or at least, that's what reporters and editors think the public wants.
This approach now is used in covering virtually everyone in the public eye. But I'm not sure that everyone wants or needs to know that Elizabeth Edwards has breast cancer or that married baseball superstar Alex Rodriguez hangs around with "a mystery blond." I don't.
Perhaps it is time for each news organization, reporter and editor to institute a Harry Potter check. Call it a human decency test.
News would still be sought with the fierce aggressiveness that is the blazing characteristic of modern journalism. But before anything's posted online, or put on the air, or printed on paper, this question would be asked: Does the informational value of this news outweigh the invasion of privacy?
In other words, how much are readers going to learn about the world and the way it works if they are given this fact or set of facts? And is that gain worth the personal loss, embarrassment or ridicule that an individual will suffer?
If enough human-decency decisions are made like this, maybe the next time a candidate's wife finds out she has a life-threatening illness, as Elizabeth Edwards did, she won't feel the need to go public with it. The only reason Edwards told the world she was sick was out of fear that reporters would discover it for themselves and criticize her husband.
Including a Harry Potter check on all stories can't be imposed from outside. It's something that each writer and editor, each news organization and blogger, will have to decide individually.
But, if, somehow, the nation's journalism community could be a tad more thoughtful about when something should be made public, it would be a change "for the greater good."
It would be magical.
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Comments
Newspapers publish our nation's military intelligence secrets so that our enemies can read all about it, but the same newspapers keep the plot of some kid's book secret.
Somebody please explain how this makes sense.
Posted by: Bruce | August 12, 2007 10:53 AM
NEWS is that millions of people bought this book & that it is a huge cultural phenomenon. The public has a 'right' to know that.
NEWS is NOT how the book ends or what anyone thought of the book - that's the review. No one has the 'right' to know that, necessarily, unless they buy the book.
Posted by: Anonymous | August 12, 2007 11:44 AM
Would somebody please publish the Iraqi Government's political reconcilliation plan so our troops can begin to leave that hell hole.
President Petraeus please say unto us.
Posted by: Doug Zook | August 12, 2007 12:14 PM
RNC Bruce,
That's an easy one.
One has to do with safeguarding our civil liberties and the other doesn't.
If you don't understand, maybe that great American Rupert Murdoch can explain it to you.
Posted by: Doug Zook | August 12, 2007 12:33 PM
Here's something the Media needs to stop hiding:
Rudy and Romney: Artful Dodgers
When the most belligerent Republicans start to beat the war drums, it's important to look at what they're trying to hide.
By Joe Conason
July 20, 2007 | Nothing unites the Republican candidates for president or excites the conservative base more than their bellicose barking about war and confrontation. The GOP presidential debates often sound like a tough-man competition, with Rudolph Giuliani denouncing the "cut-and-run" Democrats, Mitt Romney demanding a double-size Guantánamo detention camp, and the rest of the pack struggling to keep pace with the snarling alpha dogs.
Yet while their rhetoric is invariably loud and aggressive, none of these martial orators has seen a day of military service -- except for John McCain, whose prospects are rapidly deflating, and Duncan Hunter, whose campaign never got enough air for a single balloon. Unfortunately for those two decorated veterans, their party seems to prefer its hawks to be of the chickenhawk variety.
None of this may matter much. Most of the Democratic candidates lack military experience, too. But when the most belligerent Republicans start to beat the war drums, it's important to look at what they're trying to hide.
Consider Giuliani, the former New York mayor who has remained among the most vocal supporters of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. He never hesitates to suggest that politicians with differing opinions simply lack guts. When he spoke at the 2004 Republican convention, he gleefully insinuated that Democratic nominee John Kerry lacked the fortitude to combat terrorism. Now he denigrates the supposedly spineless Democrats running for president in 2008.
But he has always confined his enthusiasm for war to podium speeches and position papers. Born in 1944, young Rudy was highly eligible for military service when he reached his 20s during the Vietnam War. He did not volunteer for combat -- as Kerry did -- and instead found a highly creative way to dodge the draft.
During his years as an undergraduate at Manhattan College and then at New York University Law School, Giuliani qualified for a student deferment. Upon graduation from law school in 1968, he lost that temporary deferment and his draft status reverted to 1-A, the designation awarded to those most qualified for induction into the Army.
At the same time, Giuliani won a clerkship with federal Judge Lloyd McMahon in the fabled Southern District of New York, where he would become the United States attorney. He naturally had no desire to trade his ticket on the legal profession's fast track for latrine duty in the jungle. So he quickly applied for another deferment based on his judicial clerkship. This time the Selective Service System denied his claim.
That was when the desperate Giuliani prevailed upon his boss to write to the draft board, asking them to grant him a fresh deferment and reclassification as an "essential" civilian employee. As the great tabloid columnist Jimmy Breslin noted 20 years later, during the former prosecutor's first campaign for mayor: "Giuliani did not attend the war in Vietnam because federal Judge Lloyd MacMahon [sic] wrote a letter to the draft board in 1969 and got him out. Giuliani was a law clerk for MacMahon, who at the time was hearing Selective Service cases. MacMahon's letter to Giuliani's draft board stated that Giuliani was so necessary as a law clerk that he could not be allowed to get shot at in Vietnam."
His clerkship ended the following year but his luck held firm. By then President Nixon had transformed the Selective Service into a lottery system, and despite Rudy's renewed 1-A status, he drew a high lottery number and was never drafted.
Today Giuliani's problem is not avoiding military service but explaining how and why he avoided it. A spokesperson for the candidate recently told New York magazine that he "has made it clear that if he had been called up, he would have served," which doesn't quite expiate his strenuous efforts to make sure that never happened. Giuliani opposed the Vietnam War for "strategic and tactical" reasons as well, according to his flack. Of course, that sounds much like the bipartisan dissent against the Iraq war that he now dismisses so contemptuously.
If Giuliani has a draft problem, Romney's may be even worse. The former Massachusetts governor, whose supporters object strenuously to any discussion of his religious beliefs, got his military service deferred thanks to the Mormon church.
Like Giuliani and millions of other young American men at the time, Romney started out with student deferments. But he left Stanford after only two semesters in 1966 and would have become eligible for the draft -- except that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Michigan, his home state, provided him with a fresh deferment as a missionary. According to an excellent investigative series that appeared last month in the Boston Globe, that deferment, which described Romney as a "minister of religion or divinity student," protected him from the draft between July 1966 and February 1969, when he enrolled in Brigham Young University to complete his undergraduate degree. Mormons in each state could select a limited number of young men upon whom to confer missionary status during the Vietnam years, and Romney was fortunate enough to be chosen. (Coincidentally, or possibly not, Mitt's father, George W. Romney, was governor of Michigan at the time.)
Now Romney echoes Giuliani by asserting that if he had been called, he would have served. "I was supportive of my country," he told Globe reporter Michael Kranish. "I longed in many respects to actually be in Vietnam and be representing our country there and in some ways it was frustrating not to feel like I was there as part of the troops that were fighting in Vietnam." Perhaps. But it is hard to blame Romney for choosing missionary work over military service. After all, the Mormons didn't send him to proselytize in the slums of the Philippines, Guatemala or Kenya.
They sent him to France.
Posted by: John E | August 12, 2007 1:58 PM
Here's something the Media needs to stop hiding:
Rudy and Romney: Artful Dodgers
When the most belligerent Republicans start to beat the war drums, it's important to look at what they're trying to hide.
By Joe Conason
July 20, 2007 | Nothing unites the Republican candidates for president or excites the conservative base more than their bellicose barking about war and confrontation. The GOP presidential debates often sound like a tough-man competition, with Rudolph Giuliani denouncing the "cut-and-run" Democrats, Mitt Romney demanding a double-size Guantánamo detention camp, and the rest of the pack struggling to keep pace with the snarling alpha dogs.
Yet while their rhetoric is invariably loud and aggressive, none of these martial orators has seen a day of military service -- except for John McCain, whose prospects are rapidly deflating, and Duncan Hunter, whose campaign never got enough air for a single balloon. Unfortunately for those two decorated veterans, their party seems to prefer its hawks to be of the chickenhawk variety.
None of this may matter much. Most of the Democratic candidates lack military experience, too. But when the most belligerent Republicans start to beat the war drums, it's important to look at what they're trying to hide.
Consider Giuliani, the former New York mayor who has remained among the most vocal supporters of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. He never hesitates to suggest that politicians with differing opinions simply lack guts. When he spoke at the 2004 Republican convention, he gleefully insinuated that Democratic nominee John Kerry lacked the fortitude to combat terrorism. Now he denigrates the supposedly spineless Democrats running for president in 2008.
But he has always confined his enthusiasm for war to podium speeches and position papers. Born in 1944, young Rudy was highly eligible for military service when he reached his 20s during the Vietnam War. He did not volunteer for combat -- as Kerry did -- and instead found a highly creative way to dodge the draft.
During his years as an undergraduate at Manhattan College and then at New York University Law School, Giuliani qualified for a student deferment. Upon graduation from law school in 1968, he lost that temporary deferment and his draft status reverted to 1-A, the designation awarded to those most qualified for induction into the Army.
At the same time, Giuliani won a clerkship with federal Judge Lloyd McMahon in the fabled Southern District of New York, where he would become the United States attorney. He naturally had no desire to trade his ticket on the legal profession's fast track for latrine duty in the jungle. So he quickly applied for another deferment based on his judicial clerkship. This time the Selective Service System denied his claim.
That was when the desperate Giuliani prevailed upon his boss to write to the draft board, asking them to grant him a fresh deferment and reclassification as an "essential" civilian employee. As the great tabloid columnist Jimmy Breslin noted 20 years later, during the former prosecutor's first campaign for mayor: "Giuliani did not attend the war in Vietnam because federal Judge Lloyd MacMahon [sic] wrote a letter to the draft board in 1969 and got him out. Giuliani was a law clerk for MacMahon, who at the time was hearing Selective Service cases. MacMahon's letter to Giuliani's draft board stated that Giuliani was so necessary as a law clerk that he could not be allowed to get shot at in Vietnam."
His clerkship ended the following year but his luck held firm. By then President Nixon had transformed the Selective Service into a lottery system, and despite Rudy's renewed 1-A status, he drew a high lottery number and was never drafted.
Today Giuliani's problem is not avoiding military service but explaining how and why he avoided it. A spokesperson for the candidate recently told New York magazine that he "has made it clear that if he had been called up, he would have served," which doesn't quite expiate his strenuous efforts to make sure that never happened. Giuliani opposed the Vietnam War for "strategic and tactical" reasons as well, according to his flack. Of course, that sounds much like the bipartisan dissent against the Iraq war that he now dismisses so contemptuously.
If Giuliani has a draft problem, Romney's may be even worse. The former Massachusetts governor, whose supporters object strenuously to any discussion of his religious beliefs, got his military service deferred thanks to the Mormon church.
Like Giuliani and millions of other young American men at the time, Romney started out with student deferments. But he left Stanford after only two semesters in 1966 and would have become eligible for the draft -- except that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Michigan, his home state, provided him with a fresh deferment as a missionary. According to an excellent investigative series that appeared last month in the Boston Globe, that deferment, which described Romney as a "minister of religion or divinity student," protected him from the draft between July 1966 and February 1969, when he enrolled in Brigham Young University to complete his undergraduate degree. Mormons in each state could select a limited number of young men upon whom to confer missionary status during the Vietnam years, and Romney was fortunate enough to be chosen. (Coincidentally, or possibly not, Mitt's father, George W. Romney, was governor of Michigan at the time.)
Now Romney echoes Giuliani by asserting that if he had been called, he would have served. "I was supportive of my country," he told Globe reporter Michael Kranish. "I longed in many respects to actually be in Vietnam and be representing our country there and in some ways it was frustrating not to feel like I was there as part of the troops that were fighting in Vietnam." Perhaps. But it is hard to blame Romney for choosing missionary work over military service. After all, the Mormons didn't send him to proselytize in the slums of the Philippines, Guatemala or Kenya.
They sent him to France.
Posted by: John E | August 12, 2007 1:58 PM
It's nonsensical to think that information published in our nations newspapers will help our "enemies" accomplish things of which they would have been incapable otherwise. Newspapers have the right to publish the stories they believe people need to know and the stories they believe people want to know. People (adults and children alike) did not want to be told the end of the Harry Potter book. The decision of whether to publish a story or not is that of the newspaper itself. It takes a rare confluence of events such as the Harry Potter release to evoke such a regard for the desires of the audience.
Posted by: David | August 12, 2007 2:50 PM
Unless they're a Republican, then its full steam ahead.
Posted by: Terry | August 12, 2007 3:48 PM
How long did it take FDR's economic policies to get the country out of the depression?
Posted by: Terry | August 12, 2007 3:56 PM
Terry,
Objection. Relevance?
Posted by: Doug Zook | August 12, 2007 7:17 PM
Doug or Judge Wopner
If you read the article, it mentions FDR. There is the great myth that FDR's gov't programs pulled this country from the depression, what the media never mentions is how long it took this country to come out from the depression and what was the cause of coming out from the depression.
Posted by: Terry | August 12, 2007 8:26 PM
Ahhhhh....the dems!
Only a handful of Americans knew that FDR was crippled. JFK,B.J. Clinton and loser John(I was in Viet Nam,4-3 months)Kerry never did released their medical records...I wonder why?
Well,we all know why...don't we.
Paulo
Posted by: Paulo | August 12, 2007 9:42 PM
Terry,
Council is not Italian.
Posted by: Doug Zook | August 12, 2007 11:02 PM
Terry,
Neither is counsel.
Posted by: Doug Zook | August 12, 2007 11:05 PM
I think it wonderful that a Swamp journalist finally admits what we all know:
1) that journalists often hide the truth, censoring important stories;
2) that journalists have appointed themselves the determiners of what us common folk are allowed to know.
The $64,000 question is: after admitting that journalists deliberately hide the truth, why should anyone believe what journalists tell us?
Posted by: Bruce | August 13, 2007 9:42 AM
Terry,
It's reasonable to question the speed with which FDR's policies brought us out of the depression. Or even if his policies "were" the solution.
What's not questionable is his leadership and vision in establishing rules and departments such as the SEC, FDIC and the NASD, to help fend off future depressions.
Posted by: Steve | August 13, 2007 10:33 AM
Leave it to Commissar Zook and his fellow leftnuts to defend journalists who lie.
Posted by: Bruce | August 13, 2007 11:22 AM
RNC Bruce,
Dude you crack me up eith the commissar stuff.
Uploading nukes & pulling alert duty on B-52s 30 years ago, your's truly was part of the "tip of the spear" U.S. nuclear triad capability ready to fight the Soviet commies at a moment's notice. Our launch control facility had nine B-52s with 8 nukes each arranged in a backed in Christmas tree pattern set up to launch with firefighter like notice and execution within minutes. A few of us were also on "mobility" where we'd launch our aircraft then fly to Alaska to repair any returning B-52s to rearm with more nukes to go do it again. Dr. Strangelove was an optomist.
Anyway, thanks for the laughs, "Commissar."
Posted by: Sac Ramento | August 13, 2007 11:42 AM
Paulo's an idiot. Bush is the biggest hider of info and it's stupid that this conversation devolved to this, when it had nothing to do with it at all. Of course, then I go and add to it ...
Posted by: Tom Collins | August 13, 2007 12:32 PM
Doug -
"Council is not Italian." - Huh?
Steve,
and then their are those things that haunt us today - social security and wage controls he put into effect during WW2 - two largest impacts on our lives - both negative.
Posted by: Terry | August 13, 2007 3:00 PM
Terry,
You occupy the extreme minority position with your "social security haunts us to this day" concept. The problem with social security is that it is not adequately funded, not that it is a scourge on this nation.
Please please please please convince your GOP overlords to run on the straightforward concept of killing social security. It worked oh so well for Bush II. You want to insure a permanent Democratic majority? Try to kill social security. Pretty please.
Posted by: How to Lose an Election: by Terry | August 13, 2007 3:42 PM
Loser,
Sometimes the extreme minority position is correct.
How would like to have had 12.4% of you salary to invest into a retirment fund? I don't about your economic worth, but you would probably have over a million dollars when you retire. Add that to a 401K and/or pension.
How would like to have 2.9% of you salary to invest into a fund that would pay your insurance/medical bills when you retire? Probably have a few $100K.
Also, if you die before you run out of money - actuarially speaking, you probably would, you would turn that over to your heirs.
Doesn;t that sound better than socialist redistribution?
Posted by: Terry | August 13, 2007 4:57 PM
Its a safety net, not an investment scheme, Terry.
Anyway, I hope your GOP heroes revisit gutting social security.
Posted by: How to Lose an Election: by Terry | August 13, 2007 7:49 PM
Loser,
Investment SCHEME??? that says more about your socialist views than it does about your faith in the economy.
I never knew investing in the American economy was a scheme? Would that be an "Al Gore - Risky Scheme?"
Posted by: Terry | August 13, 2007 9:32 PM