Rocking Out Against ‘Voldemedia’

This guest post is by Andrew Slack, the founder of the Harry Potter Alliance, a movement dedicated to bringing together Harry Potter fans to apply the book series’ lessons of love, tolerance and social justice to our own world. He made headlines for his hit viral video and activist Web site “Waldemart Watch,” and is the driving force behind “Rock Out Against Voldemedia,” a compilation of ten original songs by ten Harry Potter-themed “Wizard Rock” bands. The compilation album and accompanying Web site draw the link between the perils of media consolidation in the Wizarding World — and our own.

Harry Potter series presents a world where media consolidation continues to fail the Wizarding World.

The Daily Prophet Ignores the Real Issues

When the Daily Prophet denied Voldemort’s return, Voldemort grew stronger: freeing Death Eaters, putting people under the Imperius Curse, forming dangerous alliances with giants, and killing innocent people left and right.

Once “Dumbledore’s Army” finally made them admit that Voldemort was back, the Daily Prophet refused to question the arrests of Stan Shunpike and Mundungus Fletcher and the fact that like the late Sirius Black, neither had received fair trials.

Finally, the Daily Prophet did not report on the fact that Voldemort had infiltrated the Ministry.

Our World

In our world, the U.S. media continue to do inadequate reporting by cutting over 80% of foreign news coverage over the last 20 years and replacing it with sports, weather and celebrity gossip. Many of the horrors that are happening in the Middle East as well as the genocide in Darfur are a gory testament to Big Media’s inability to properly inform the American people.

And like the Daily Prophet — which continued to spout the popular idea that Muggleborns were second class citizens — the U.S. is made up of 33% of racial and ethnic minorities yet only a little over 3% of television stations and around 7% of radio stattion are owned by minorities. Furthermore, while 60% of our country is made up of women and minorities, they only make up 12% of who we see on the news. The other 88% is composed of white men.

But rather than acting in the public’s interest, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin is trying to get Big Media companies to own even more of the news.

Potterwatch

Once Voldemort took over every form of media in the Wizarding World, Dumbledore’s Army and the Order of the Phoenix formed an independent media movement called “Potterwatch.”

Now the HP Alliance and Wizard Rock have come together to fight for a Potterwatch movement in the real world to fight back against Big VoldeMedia from further pushing out local and foreign news, minority representation, and the right to a Free Press.

Sign This Petition To Join Our Movement »

Go Here To Hear The Wizard Rock Compilation »

This entry was posted on Monday, December 10th, 2007 at 2:29 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.