A story about how Rowling was denied a Presidential Medal because her books encouraged witchcraft.
Interesting Story re. Rowling and White House
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{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
The only proof of this is the assertion of Matt Latimer who’s promoting his new book on the Bush administration. It is well proven, though, that Laura Bush was a great fan & admirer of the HP series.
I’ve been following this story over the past couple days, and as usual, The Daily Prophet is doing its thing.
From what I understand, there were advisors in the White House who discouraged Rowling’s getting a medal and all. But I’m rather certain it had more to do with with perception and the response that kind of medal would get from fundamentalist Christian camps than it did actual belief, at least on the part of the first couple at the time, that the books encouraged witchcraft.
At the very least, to be fair, George and Laura have often confessed to being big fans of Harry Potter. Melissa Anelli reports:
Links with evidence at the Leaky link.
Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised there were nitwits within the administration who would discourage Rowling receiving an award to appease or not rile up certain groups. But you’ll find those people within any administration. But hey, I’m a cynic when it comes to politics.
I’d find this article more convincing if it weren’t clearly an excuse to bash the Bush-era administration–it’s an incredibly biased article, and made me want to roll my eyes and demand both sources and rationality.
I Googled Matt Latimer and JKR, and came up with approximately 97 articles reporting this bit of news, including the FOX News (aka “right-wing propaganda machine”) website, which can hardly be said to be sympathetic to the Democrats. However, all these articles are based on a single source: Matt Latimer’s book.
If you look up Latimer on Wikipedia, you see that several senior members of the Bush administration have spoken out vocally against Latimer:
In a September 22, 2009 Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “When Speechwriters Kiss and Tell,” Latimer’s former White House boss, William McGurn, questions Latimer’s motives and challenges many of the claims made in the book.
In a September 2009 article, former Special Assistant to the President and Advance Office aide Jason Recher questioned whether Latimer “could be picked out of a lineup” by most White House staff members
What is not in dispute is that Latimer said what he said about the Bush administration and JKR. What is in dispute is whether JKR was deliberately snubbed. It’s harder to prove why something doesn’t happen than why something happens (although the latter can also be tricky).
For me, what is really interesting in the reporting is not the bit about JKR – Think Progress and FOX News report that similarly, although Think Progress is more given to quote-unquotes, but what FOX does not report and Think Progress does: the claim that the same veto was applied to Ted Kennedy because he was seen as a “liberal”. Surely the slur on Kennedy is more newsworthy than the slur on a British children’s author. And yet FOX doesn’t have room for it.
You can have a lot of fun, comparing who reports what and on what page and with what headline. Tells you a lot about the media. The truth, of course, has to be triangulated. Which is why I subscribe to three newspapers.
I do remember reading somewhere several years back that George W. Bush and his wife are Harry Potter fans, as revgeorge and Travis pointed out.
““That’s crazy!” he thundered. Kennedy was a liberal, he noted (of which I was well aware). ”
The parenthetical remark made me laugh.