Hence the deliberate campaign of disinformation; Fudge effectively controlled the only respected news publication, and used it to build on the foundation laid by Rita Skeeter (for her own reasons). Ironically, the very thing he was denying gave him material to work with; while it’s not clear how much the public knew about the events of Harry’s first year, it was presumably public knowledge that a number of students were attacked and nearly killed inside Hogwarts, a notorious mass-murderer had infiltrated the school, and a major international event was plagued with irregularities and ended with a student dead–all within the last few years. From an outside point of view, the school has been staggering from crisis to crisis under Dumbledore’s watch. Properly spun, with emphasis on Dumbledore’s age, that could erode a lot of trust in him.
As for Harry himself, for all that he’s a legend, he’s still a child in the eyes of the magical community, which is rather conservative in many ways. He’s respected as an icon, rather than as a person. When he starts saying things they don’t want to hear, and the voices of authority say otherwise, they’re inclined to stick their heads in the sand. For that matter, you’re assuming the Ministry is actually publicly saying that he’s lying. Most of their propaganda against him seems to be aimed at painting him as delusional, I think: a lonely, traumatized orphan with a scar on his head from a powerful curse, imagining things that just happen to fill a natural craving for attention. It would be easier to sell him as brain-damaged than as a bad person; those not inclined to laugh at him could regard him as a tragic figure, walking wounded from the war he ended.
Even Arthur and Molly, despite knowing him, caring for him, and knowing some of the things he’s accomplished, don’t really take him all that seriously until late in the series. You would think that somewhere among the evil wizards, basilisks, dementors, and dragons, they would start to regard him as a bad-ass, but they don’t, at least until his vision saves Arthur. Against that kind of resistance, why would you expect the witch and wizard on the street–who haven’t had Harry personally rescue their child from a horrible monster–to believe him over the (apparently) independent words of the government and the media?
And if he’s good enough, he could resist the various magical polygraphs even if he is lying. If Umbridge is certain she’s right, she has nothing to gain by giving Harry the chance to beat a magical polygraph. I don’t know that we can trust that Umbridge even really cared about the truth or if she just cared about protecting her position. She was doing pretty well for herself with Fudge in charge and if anything even better once the Ministry fell to the Death Eaters, but couldn’t expect that Dumbledore would keep her around if he took over.
I’m fuzzy on the details now, but it was my impression that the wizard-on-the-street wasn’t very well informed about Harry’s claims about Voldemort’s return. The government had done their best to hush it up, the mainstream press didn’t cover it, there wasn’t really any evidence aside from Harry’s word, and the alleged encounter with Voldemort happened under very suspicious circumstances. Rita Skeeter had just published an article saying Harry was a dangerous psycho, then in the last event of the Triwizard Tournament Cedric is mysteriously killed leaving Harry the winner.
Looking at the HP wiki, the interview with Harry where he describes what really happened at the end of the Triwizard Tournament doesn’t occur until February the year of the fifth book…and it runs in The Quibbler, which was basically The Weekly World News. Still, a lot of people apparently found the article persuasive, and the matter is settled for good a few months later when Fudge actually sees Voldemort for himself.
All of which is well and good, but all of which is your (certainly arguably reasonable) theory, not official word from JK Rowling, and certainly not anything found in the text of the book. My point is that as a reader, as someone who sympathized with Harry, I found his predicament as presented in Order of the Phoenix particularly frustrating because, given the rules of the universe as presented to us, there was such an obvious-seeming way out… and one which not only would have benefited Harry personally, but would have benefited the wizarding world as a whole. And of course while Harry was just a schoolboy, he did have some powerful allies such as, gee, I dunno, Albus Dumbledore, who, as far as we were led to believe, shared the same beliefs and motivations as Harry himself. You are NOT going to tell me that if Albus frickin’ Dumbledore wanted to do the magical equivalent of having a press conference that everyone in Wizarding Britain could see he would have been unable to do so due to something as trivial as Fudge controlling the Daily Prophet…
Could JK Rowling have come up with some reasonably convincing reasons why such a plan would not have worked? I’m sure she could have, and they may well have resembled those that you and others have proposed. But the fact that such a plan was never even mentioned or considered is what I find galling and frustrating.
Fudge is pretty damn powerful if he can not only take over Hogwarts, but also get Dumbledore booted out of the Wizengamot and representative to the ICW.
To a man on the street, Harry’s story is a bit far fetched given that the suspects he named were all old news and improbably linked to a sporting event (Tri-wizards.)
I’m just speculating about Umbrige’s motives, but it is the official word of JK Rowling that veritaserum could be beaten. It doesn’t look like the Harry Potter FAQ is up on her current website, but here’s her response about veritaserum via the Wayback Machine. This question was apparently asked between the publication of Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix. The HP wiki also cites Order of the Phoenix as saying that veritaserum could be resisted with Occlumency and also that there was an antidote for it. (I don’t remember this, but I assume it came up when Umbridge started using veritaserum on students.) In Order of the Phoenix we definitely learn that Occlumency can be used to guard against Legilimency, as Snape gives Harry lessons in it to help him guard against Voldemort’s attempts to read his mind.
I don’t really like to defend Order of the Phoenix because IMHO it’s probably the weakest book in the series, but there’s an obvious problem with using veritaserum to prove someone is telling the truth even if the potion were 100% effective. A determined liar might find a way to tamper with the potion before it was administered.
And Dumbly was avoiding an open defiance to the Ministry because that’s what Voldie would have wanted. I thought that was clear. OOTP had its use in the anthology; putting Harry’s, Ron’s, Hermione’s and Dumbledore’s powers and abilities in a clear adult perspective. Much more interesting was HBP.
Well, in that very book, Umbridge DID try to get Harry to drink veritaserum, and he was smart enough to not imbibe any (this aside from the fact that Snape didn’t give her the real stuff because he’s in Dumbledore’s side vs Umbridge/Fudge).
And isn’t it telling that her only questions were the whereabouts of Dumbledore and Sirius?
It’s clear that she was drinking Fudge’s Kool-Aid. She did reveal that she was capable of going behind his back, but only in order to achieve the ends she knew he (and like-minded minstry folk like herself) wanted but were too timid to employ her means.
She is cruel and racist and evil, but she was acting in what she saw as the interests of the Ministry and, by extension, the wizarding world. And many in the wizarding world shared her worldview rather than the more egalitarian one of Dumbledore (who, in fact, we later learned was himself somewhat like that, until he was sobered up by the incident that led to his sister’s death).
Those means being illegally sending Dementors after an underage wizard in the middle of a community of defenseless Muggles.
As for her supposed loyalty to Fudge, she doesn’t seem too broken up about Fudge being ousted when she shows up again in Deathly Hallows. She wasn’t just keeping her head down and carrying on with her work while trying to stay out of trouble either, she seemed pretty happy about being able to enforce the new anti-Muggle-born laws and stir up anti-Muggle sentiment. IIRC Fudge was depicted as being pretty tolerant when it came to Muggles, which is another reason I doubt Umbridge had much regard for him. For all we know Fudge was drinking her Kool-Aid when it came to his suspicions of Dumbledore and Harry, although that’s pure speculation on my part.
I do not remember anything from the books that indicates that she actually gave a damn about the interests of the Ministry except insofar as it gave her power.
One thing I’m surprised about is why no one killed Draco towards the end. I figured someone who lost a loved one during the war would be seeking revenge.
Another factor that should have factored into whether or not people believed Harry is that it was presumably a matter of established fact, at least to people such as the Aurors, that Barty Crouch Jr. had in fact infiltrated Hogwarts and rigged the Tri-Wizard Cup tournament in order to get Harry to touch a Portkey and… go somewhere for some purpose. (And note that Barty Crouch Jr., a resourceful and powerful adult wizard, did seem to be affected by Verita serum.)
And, of course, SOMEONE or SOMETHING killed Cedric Diggory.
Put all of that together and all-the-adults-don’t-believe-Harry goes far past “well, it’s scary so we’ll put our fingers in our ears” into bizarre and inexplicable deliberate disinformation. I feel like the story JK Rowling wanted to tell would have fit well and made sense if Harry had just woken up in the Gryffindor common room one day and said “hey, guys, last night I was kidnapped from my bed, and saw Voldemort, and then escaped and snuck back into my bed. Honestly, I did! Guys? Guys?” as opposed to the situation that ended up happening.
But, given that my fundamental point is not “there’s no possible justification for what happened in the book” but is “I found it frustrating, as a book reader, that this issue was left glaringly unaddressed”, there’s not a huge amount of point in debating it.
I don’t think you’re being fair with this one. Cedric died while competing in an extremely dangerous magical tournament, and as far as the spectators knew this occurred while he was in a maze full of traps and monsters. There’s a whole list of SOMEONES and SOMETHINGS that could have killed him in there and all would have seemed more plausible than a resurrected Lord Voldemort. Harry himself was a far more likely candidate than Voldemort.
Even someone who believed both that Voldemort was really back and that Cedric was murdered might consider it a little suspicious that ol’ red eyes dropped by to kill the guy who was competing against Harry in the tournament and also dating the girl Harry liked, then popped off again leaving Harry mostly unharmed, the winner of a big cash prize, and with no one standing between him and Cho Chang. Oh yeah, and literally holding the corpse.
And it would have been a really interesting idea if in fact the powers that be hinted darkly that, gosh, maybe it was Harry who killed Diggory.
But, unless I’m forgetting something, we never saw that happen in the book.
A lot of this comes down to some things we don’t really know about how magic, and the wizarding world, works. Is there a way to inspect an object and verify that it was a portkey? Is there a way to inspect a portkey and verify how many people travelled using it recently? Is there a way to sense that powerful magic has been cast in a local region? Is there a way to inspect a wand and see what spells have been cast by it recently? Are the ways that one might beat verita serum or occulomency ones that even a very talented 5th year likely to know? Is there any responsible organization of adults in the wizarding community who investigate suspicious deaths and kidnappings? How many media outlets other than the daily prophet are there? Etc., etc., etc. I feel like I’m repeating myself here, but I’m not opposed to some Star Trek style technobabble from time to time. Why couldn’t anyone else verify what Harry saw at the graveyard? Well, the magical equivalent of one of those things that always stops the transporters from working when they’re really needed was present. Why couldn’t Harry testify under any kind of magical anything? Umm, there’s a law against it. But at least briefly dismiss and acknowledge those possibilities, rather than just “A famous celebrity told an amazing and important story and there was a suspicious death (and kidnapping) involved, but they didn’t believe him and he was sad”.
Cedric was killed by evil abra-kadabra which is easily verified. Harry could not have cast it. Maybe Krum and Delacour can, but their wands will show they’re innocent. Harry’s and Cedric’s last activity in the maze can be checked (down to the injured acromantula.) Harry had a knife wound. He and the dead Cedric reappeared amidst confused wizards which could only mean transport via portkey. Lastly, Harry’s wand can be checked for priori incantatem. No, Fudge was being an idiot.
He and the dead Cedric reappeared amidst confused wizards which could only mean transport via portkey. QUOTE]
The cup was presumably always supposed to be a portkey, but it was only supposed to go back to the start of the maze.
Is it just me who thinks the triwizard tournament was really stupidly designed anyway though? There’s only one event where the audience can actually see anything. You’d think they’d rig up some kind of magical camera thingy at least.
I think “really stupidly designed” sums up a lot of Harry Potter. That isn’t necessarily a slam on Rowling. She crafted her world to fit the narrative, and in my opinion crafted it well enough that the character development and general plot worked very well. I mean, I read all the books within a day or two of getting them, don’t get me wrong, I like Harry Potter.
However, when I say she crafted it to the narrative, I mean that things are designed such that they can fail in a way the plot demands. While the world isn’t often inconsistent in the strictest sense – that things directly contradict each other – it’s frequently designed in a way where it’s clear that the Way Things Work are cobbled together from pieces that allow Harry and Co to get where they need to go, or Voldy and Co can create dramatic tension. Not in any way that really fits together naturally, and certainly not in a way doesn’t leave open a bunch of questions and holes.
To be fair, I have this criticism of a lot of fictional worlds. It’s not like Rowling is alone here. It’s rare for an author to make a world with consistent rules first, and allow a good narrative to develop without hacking the rules a bit when necessary. I think Rowling’s world-building flaws in Harry Potter are perhaps a bit more obvious or glaring than the cracks in some other universes, but even when characters act stupid or things happen/exist because plot, it works plenty well enough that I don’t mind.
I can’t think of specific examples from the earlier books, but I remember there being a fair number of things about magic/the wizarding world that Rowling had pretty obviously come up with in-between books rather than having them in mind all along. This generally wasn’t a problem*, it was more just “Funny how XYZ was never mentioned before.” And the destruction of all the time turners in the fifth book seemed to me like something she had to stick in so she could get on with things and without “Well, why couldn’t someone just use a time turner to go back and save Dumbledore/stop Voldemort?” being a constant question. But at the same time I don’t think it would have been practical for Rowling to plan things out in great detail before publishing the books. Certainly when she was writing the first book she had no way of knowing whether even that one would ever see the light of day, much less whether she’d have the chance to publish a seven book series, and then once the books became a huge success she must have been under a lot of pressure to get the next one finished.
Rowling has been pretty frank about saying there are problems in the books due to time constraints/sloppiness on her part. I remember hearing a while back that she was planning to do a revised edition of the HP series where she’d fix some mistakes and inconsistencies, but I don’t know if that’s ever really going to happen.
*Until the last two books. Given how much of Deathly Hallows was devoted to the search for and destruction of Voldemort’s horcruxes and also who had possession of the Elder Wand, I felt these elements should have been introduced much earlier. The seventh and final book in a series shouldn’t have required so much exposition.
Well, I mean, you can hardly expect grand worldbuilding from her. Not because I don’t think she’s capable of it, but simply because the first book was written on the dole and, as you say, she didn’t have any inkling that it would ever even be published. She didn’t exactly have the luxury of being a professor with some spare time who wanted to use a book to make up languages and mythologies like Tolkien or anything. She did amazingly well for what she had.
The three-year summer before Harry’s 5th year gave her more than enough time to sculpt the world of wizards. HBP and DH was just one story and OOTP would have been good for 5 chapters max. A one-year time frame per book poses serious limitations.