YOU can't really have a full-blown media event without some sort of knotty media controversy.
Today's release of the seventh and final installment in J.K. Rowling's magically successful series of novels for young people certainly qualifies as the former; let's call the latter: "Harry Potter and the Inevitably Leaky Embargo."
Rowling's publishers -- Scholastic in the United States and Bloomsbury elsewhere in the world -- have done everything but cast spells and threaten curses to ensure that the contents of the series finale would remain secret until this morning's appointed witching hour -- 12:01. (Whatever its literary attributes, the lucrative commercial apparatus that is Harry Pot-ter Inc. never has lacked a sense of drama. Indeed, no Scot since Macbeth has done as much for witches and wizards as Rowling.)
In this case, the controversy arises principally because two U.S. newspapers -- the New York Times and the Baltimore Sun -- obtained copies of the book before the official release date and published reviews this week. The New York Times said it purchased its book from a retail outlet, while the Sun reported that its copy was obtained from an individual whose advance mail order somehow was filled early. Fair enough.
There's also a separate -- and, frankly, more serious -- issue about purported copies of the text that were posted on the Internet.
Oddly, it's the reviews that have kindled a rhetorical goblet of fire.
Shortly after Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Michiko Kakutani's review appeared in the New York Times on Thursday, Rachel Sklar attacked it and the paper on the Huffington Post: "What is your problem, New York Times?" she wrote. "No [weapons of mass destruction] to plaster on the front page, no Jayson Blair to make things up for posterity...? I'm mad so I'm lashing out, but come on: How on earth could you run a review of the last 'Harry Potter'? To do so, you had to break an industry-wide embargo -- and not just any embargo, an embargo that is almost tantamount to a public trust at this point, given the worldwide hype about Harry Potter and the excitement and intense emotion generated by -- finally -- the end to this epic series."
Usually, what the public trusts a newspaper to do is to tell things, not withhold information, but maybe those rules don't apply to "the boy who lived" any more than the laws of nature do.
