She worked at a newspaper and punished gossip stories that would sell. was she any more “Paid” than any other employee at a biased newspaper? It’s been a while since I read the relevant book but I don’t recall her being bribed by or taking orders from Lucius.
She worked at a newspaper and punished gossip stories that would sell
Gossip stories that were weapons (used by one side to prosecute two separate wars with thousands of casaulties) and acknowledged as such by all well-informed players; or are we going to claim that Skeeter, investigative reporter par excellence, somehow missed that she was really working for Malfoy despite everyone else knowing?
Whether Lucius hands her a sack of gold or signs a check to the Daily Prophet makes no difference. It would be like asking whether Tokyo Rose was paid on an hourly basis or annual salary.
(Or if the payment method does make a difference, I will remember the particular corporate and moral niceties for if I ever hire an assassin.)
canon!Skeeter was a tool of Fudge. Thus, if Fudge was a tool of Malfoy, then Skeeter was a tool of Malfoy. But I’m not convinced that Fudge knew that he was a Malfoy tool. Certainly, his reactions amount to “doing worse than Neville Chamberlain when confronting an evil tyrant,” which was a very advantageous position for the Ministry of Magic to take, from Malfoy’s point of view.
Nonetheless, my impression from canon was that Fudge’s “la-la-la I’m not listening strategy” was a happy accident from Malfoy’s point of view, not a planned strategy. And if Fudge was not conspiring with Malfoy, then it seems reasonable that Skeeter (a knowing lackey of Fudge) would not think she was one of Malfoy’s tools.
Of course, a substantial amount of this impression is based on my belief that Rowling was a terrible world-builder and that the canon Potterverse contained essentially zero competent plotters. For example, Chamber of Secrets is an unintended consequence of Malfoy’s petty act against a bureaucratic rival. Voldemort received no benefit from Malfoy’s acts, and Malfoy should have know that. Heck, Malfoy himself received no benefit, and didn’t even seem to expect one. In short, he shouldn’t have used a powerful Voldemort artifact the way he did.
Edit: None of this should be read as disagreeing with the view that Skeeter knew that a natural consequence of her work was destroying people’s lives and this didn’t bother her one bit.
That’s the impression of the characters in book 5, but the end of book 4 pretty clearly shows that Fudge’s impressions of Harry were guided by Skeeter, not the other way around.
“You are prepared to believe that Lord Voldemort has returned, on the word of a lunatic murderer, and a boy who… well…”
Fudge shot Harry another look, and Harry suddenly understood.
“You’ve been reading Rita Skeeter, Mr. Fudge,” he said quietly.
...
Fudge reddened slightly, but a defiant and obstinate look came over his face.
“And if I have?” he said, looking at Dumbledore. “If I have discovered that you’ve been keeping certain facts about the boy very quiet? A Parselmouth, eh? And having funny turns all over the place—”
As for what you said about Lucius being a shoddy plotter—well, he did fail in CoS, so you could make an argument to that opinion. But look at it from another point of view.
Through an excessive amount of force—an admittedly stupid move which did get him kicked off of the Board eventually—he got Dumbledore removed as Headmaster, and if Harry hadn’t triumphed against ridiculous odds, it likely would have stuck.
If Ginny had been caught releasing the Basilisk, Arthur is discredited, which would reverse those irritating acts that he was (somehow) making into law.
If Ginny fails to be saved, then either she gets blamed for everything and Arthur is discredited or she is taken to be another victim; either way and she would be dead, which is icing on the Flawless Instrument of Death’s cake.
If Ginny is saved but people don’t believe her about the diary controlling her actions (remember, Dumbledore was supposed to be gone), then Arthur is discredited.
We don’t know too much about how much Lucius knew about the diary, but he might have known that it would have targeted Harry, which would have been quite the coup.
If the diary would have escaped, I would argue that Voldemort would get something out of it; perhaps the life stolen from Ginny could have been given to Voldemort’s shade?
None of this mentions the fact that many mudbloods were supposed to die, which he would consider to be a good thing, at least.
Lucius did not succeed in CoS—at all, really, besides temporarily removing the headmaster—but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t planning to get anything out of it.
Where are you getting this? All we know about her is she writes semi-accurate stories about Harry in the books and Quirrel says she is Lucius’ pawn. Where do we hear about her writing propaganda during the wizarding wars? Her behavior makes just as much sense if she’s just a sensationalist writer trying to sell papers to credulous idiots as if she’s a paid servant of Lucius.
Semi-accurate? She blatantly makes things up and spins things in order to smear her subjects. You could as well call an article “semi-accurate” which accuses someone of being a child molester, when the reality is that they do, in fact, spend time around children.
I think that’s exactly what Drethelin meant when s/he said “semi-accurate”. The point is that all Skeeter did was make up gossip and at the end of the day that’s not that bad. If you can point to an actual instance of someone dying or coming to great harm that stemmed from a Skeeter article, then… you can think of ONE bad thing she did. And your proposed solution is to kill her?
Hermione solves the Skeeter problem in Canon without shedding any blood, and even she goes overboard on the justice by trapping the woman inside a glass jar for hours/days. I can think of plenty of ways to stifle Skeeter without even using teleportation or invisibility or time travel—imagine what a mighty wizard like Quirrel could do. Quirrel even says that he’s going to crush her (turns out he meant that literally) just for the sheer enjoyment of it, and not because it’s what she deserves.
I just think that the people who support killing Rita Skeeter probably decided that it was a good idea because they hated her, and then cast around for justifications that sounded better than that.
If you can point to an actual instance of someone dying or coming to great harm that stemmed from a Skeeter article, then… you can think of ONE bad thing she did.
If you dredged through canon, you would probably only come up with 20-30 deaths unequivocally and specifically at Voldemort’s hand as opposed to random Death Eaters, mysterious deaths, deaths inferred but not actually known to have been Voldemort’s doing, general carnage implied but not stated etc. Maybe he’s not such a bad guy after all!
Demanding specific incidents is like demanding specific incidents of lung cancer before you can discuss the moral guilt of tobacco executives. ‘Ah, but how do you know that lung cancer was thanks to their tobacco smoking? Lung cancer is pretty common, you know!’ Or power plants or...
(‘How do you know Skeeter’s articles helped kill this particular person during Voldemort’s ignored rise to power in canon, or helped him kill people during his first war? Can you prove that Skeeter’s article was either necessary or sufficient to keep the population apathetic and let people like Cedric Diggory die?’)
In the real world, we have the luxury of investigating propagandists like Anwar Al-Awlaki or Goebbels, and can even nail them all the way down to specific deaths—this Somali kid in Minneasota decided to become a jihadi, killing himself and 4 others, that sort of thing.
In the fictional world, alas, short of someone asking Rowling whether Skeeter’s articles contributed to any deaths, we cannot know. There’s no fact of the matter about it. It’s fake, it’s not real, it never happened.
In the real world, however, being the top reporter on a government propaganda rag… What sort of blood-guilt do you think a comparable North Korean reporter or news anchor (eg. Ri Chun Hee) bears?
If you dredged through canon, you would probably only come up with 20-30 deaths unequivocally and specifically at Voldemort’s hand as opposed to random Death Eaters, mysterious deaths, deaths inferred but not actually known to have been Voldemort’s doing, general carnage implied but not stated etc. Maybe he’s not such a bad guy after all!
But you’ve moved the goalposts. I didn’t ask for deaths that were unequivocally and specifically at Skeeter’s hand—there definitely aren’t ANY of those, so if that was our condition of guilt she’d be good and Voldemort would be bad. All I asked for were ones that could be traced back to one of her articles—perhaps there are one or two of those, but if we’re allowing that as our condition of guilt then Voldemort shares responsibility for just about every death we hear about in canon so he has hundreds if not thousands of deaths on his hands.
Either way, my point was that in order to argue that Skeeter’s death was justified on utilitarian grounds, one has to prove that killing her would save lives. Killing her definitely costs one life. Stopping her from publishing costs no lives. I’m not trying to argue that Skeeter is a good person, I’m just pointing out that in the grand scheme of things she’s not that bad, and that there are plenty of ways to eliminate her as a threat without getting blood on one’s hands.
Your example about the tobacco executives is misleading. We DO require evidence that tobacco kills in order to condemn tobacco executives as being morally bankrupt. Luckily, we have that evidence. I’m asking for evidence that Skeeter articles kill, because one of the main arguments of the Kill Skeeter camp seems to be that they do kill. If you can bring me that evidence I’ll continue to agree that Skeeter needs to be stopped but I still won’t agree that she should have been killed, any more than I want to kill tobacco executives.
I’m going to repeat that for the sake of clarity. My argument is not:
“Skeeter never hurt anyone so she should be spared.”
My argument is:
“Well, I don’t agree that Skeeter definitely did kill anyone—I want to hear more evidence. Even if she did, though, we don’t need to kill her to save lives, so we shouldn’t do that. Therefore, Quirrel did a bad thing.”
When did I ever propose killing her? Quirrell is evil, but just because Rita got herself killed by someone more evil than she was doesn’t mean she wasn’t a pretty terrible person.
She worked at a newspaper and punished gossip stories that would sell. was she any more “Paid” than any other employee at a biased newspaper? It’s been a while since I read the relevant book but I don’t recall her being bribed by or taking orders from Lucius.
Gossip stories that were weapons (used by one side to prosecute two separate wars with thousands of casaulties) and acknowledged as such by all well-informed players; or are we going to claim that Skeeter, investigative reporter par excellence, somehow missed that she was really working for Malfoy despite everyone else knowing?
Whether Lucius hands her a sack of gold or signs a check to the Daily Prophet makes no difference. It would be like asking whether Tokyo Rose was paid on an hourly basis or annual salary.
(Or if the payment method does make a difference, I will remember the particular corporate and moral niceties for if I ever hire an assassin.)
canon!Skeeter was a tool of Fudge. Thus, if Fudge was a tool of Malfoy, then Skeeter was a tool of Malfoy. But I’m not convinced that Fudge knew that he was a Malfoy tool. Certainly, his reactions amount to “doing worse than Neville Chamberlain when confronting an evil tyrant,” which was a very advantageous position for the Ministry of Magic to take, from Malfoy’s point of view.
Nonetheless, my impression from canon was that Fudge’s “la-la-la I’m not listening strategy” was a happy accident from Malfoy’s point of view, not a planned strategy. And if Fudge was not conspiring with Malfoy, then it seems reasonable that Skeeter (a knowing lackey of Fudge) would not think she was one of Malfoy’s tools.
Of course, a substantial amount of this impression is based on my belief that Rowling was a terrible world-builder and that the canon Potterverse contained essentially zero competent plotters. For example, Chamber of Secrets is an unintended consequence of Malfoy’s petty act against a bureaucratic rival. Voldemort received no benefit from Malfoy’s acts, and Malfoy should have know that. Heck, Malfoy himself received no benefit, and didn’t even seem to expect one. In short, he shouldn’t have used a powerful Voldemort artifact the way he did.
Edit: None of this should be read as disagreeing with the view that Skeeter knew that a natural consequence of her work was destroying people’s lives and this didn’t bother her one bit.
That’s the impression of the characters in book 5, but the end of book 4 pretty clearly shows that Fudge’s impressions of Harry were guided by Skeeter, not the other way around.
As for what you said about Lucius being a shoddy plotter—well, he did fail in CoS, so you could make an argument to that opinion. But look at it from another point of view.
Through an excessive amount of force—an admittedly stupid move which did get him kicked off of the Board eventually—he got Dumbledore removed as Headmaster, and if Harry hadn’t triumphed against ridiculous odds, it likely would have stuck.
If Ginny had been caught releasing the Basilisk, Arthur is discredited, which would reverse those irritating acts that he was (somehow) making into law.
If Ginny fails to be saved, then either she gets blamed for everything and Arthur is discredited or she is taken to be another victim; either way and she would be dead, which is icing on the Flawless Instrument of Death’s cake.
If Ginny is saved but people don’t believe her about the diary controlling her actions (remember, Dumbledore was supposed to be gone), then Arthur is discredited.
We don’t know too much about how much Lucius knew about the diary, but he might have known that it would have targeted Harry, which would have been quite the coup.
If the diary would have escaped, I would argue that Voldemort would get something out of it; perhaps the life stolen from Ginny could have been given to Voldemort’s shade?
None of this mentions the fact that many mudbloods were supposed to die, which he would consider to be a good thing, at least.
Lucius did not succeed in CoS—at all, really, besides temporarily removing the headmaster—but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t planning to get anything out of it.
Where are you getting this? All we know about her is she writes semi-accurate stories about Harry in the books and Quirrel says she is Lucius’ pawn. Where do we hear about her writing propaganda during the wizarding wars? Her behavior makes just as much sense if she’s just a sensationalist writer trying to sell papers to credulous idiots as if she’s a paid servant of Lucius.
Semi-accurate? She blatantly makes things up and spins things in order to smear her subjects. You could as well call an article “semi-accurate” which accuses someone of being a child molester, when the reality is that they do, in fact, spend time around children.
Setting aside that incredibly weighted analogy…
I think that’s exactly what Drethelin meant when s/he said “semi-accurate”. The point is that all Skeeter did was make up gossip and at the end of the day that’s not that bad. If you can point to an actual instance of someone dying or coming to great harm that stemmed from a Skeeter article, then… you can think of ONE bad thing she did. And your proposed solution is to kill her?
Hermione solves the Skeeter problem in Canon without shedding any blood, and even she goes overboard on the justice by trapping the woman inside a glass jar for hours/days. I can think of plenty of ways to stifle Skeeter without even using teleportation or invisibility or time travel—imagine what a mighty wizard like Quirrel could do. Quirrel even says that he’s going to crush her (turns out he meant that literally) just for the sheer enjoyment of it, and not because it’s what she deserves.
I just think that the people who support killing Rita Skeeter probably decided that it was a good idea because they hated her, and then cast around for justifications that sounded better than that.
If you dredged through canon, you would probably only come up with 20-30 deaths unequivocally and specifically at Voldemort’s hand as opposed to random Death Eaters, mysterious deaths, deaths inferred but not actually known to have been Voldemort’s doing, general carnage implied but not stated etc. Maybe he’s not such a bad guy after all!
Demanding specific incidents is like demanding specific incidents of lung cancer before you can discuss the moral guilt of tobacco executives. ‘Ah, but how do you know that lung cancer was thanks to their tobacco smoking? Lung cancer is pretty common, you know!’ Or power plants or...
(‘How do you know Skeeter’s articles helped kill this particular person during Voldemort’s ignored rise to power in canon, or helped him kill people during his first war? Can you prove that Skeeter’s article was either necessary or sufficient to keep the population apathetic and let people like Cedric Diggory die?’)
In the real world, we have the luxury of investigating propagandists like Anwar Al-Awlaki or Goebbels, and can even nail them all the way down to specific deaths—this Somali kid in Minneasota decided to become a jihadi, killing himself and 4 others, that sort of thing.
In the fictional world, alas, short of someone asking Rowling whether Skeeter’s articles contributed to any deaths, we cannot know. There’s no fact of the matter about it. It’s fake, it’s not real, it never happened.
In the real world, however, being the top reporter on a government propaganda rag… What sort of blood-guilt do you think a comparable North Korean reporter or news anchor (eg. Ri Chun Hee) bears?
But you’ve moved the goalposts. I didn’t ask for deaths that were unequivocally and specifically at Skeeter’s hand—there definitely aren’t ANY of those, so if that was our condition of guilt she’d be good and Voldemort would be bad. All I asked for were ones that could be traced back to one of her articles—perhaps there are one or two of those, but if we’re allowing that as our condition of guilt then Voldemort shares responsibility for just about every death we hear about in canon so he has hundreds if not thousands of deaths on his hands.
Either way, my point was that in order to argue that Skeeter’s death was justified on utilitarian grounds, one has to prove that killing her would save lives. Killing her definitely costs one life. Stopping her from publishing costs no lives. I’m not trying to argue that Skeeter is a good person, I’m just pointing out that in the grand scheme of things she’s not that bad, and that there are plenty of ways to eliminate her as a threat without getting blood on one’s hands.
Your example about the tobacco executives is misleading. We DO require evidence that tobacco kills in order to condemn tobacco executives as being morally bankrupt. Luckily, we have that evidence. I’m asking for evidence that Skeeter articles kill, because one of the main arguments of the Kill Skeeter camp seems to be that they do kill. If you can bring me that evidence I’ll continue to agree that Skeeter needs to be stopped but I still won’t agree that she should have been killed, any more than I want to kill tobacco executives.
I’m going to repeat that for the sake of clarity. My argument is not:
My argument is:
When did I ever propose killing her? Quirrell is evil, but just because Rita got herself killed by someone more evil than she was doesn’t mean she wasn’t a pretty terrible person.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to point the finger at you specifically. I should more correctly have written, “the proposed solution,” or something.