A Different Halloween

Chapter 61

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Peter White thought today's Prophet would finally get the ministry off his back, and relieve some of the pressure coming from the paper's owners. The picture of Lucius Malfoy, now modeling the latest fashion in magical restraints, being led away by a couple of serious looking aurors would be a great deterrent to any of his former colleagues contemplating similar actions.

Rita's exposé would also be a reminder to the magical community that the death eater problem hadn't been completely eradicated. It was now clear that there were those for whom time in Azkaban wouldn't alter their extreme, and certainly no longer tolerable views. While those accompanying Malfoy on this raid could be classed as young and impressionable, their leader had just spent the last decade in that no star offshore resort. The Prophet was calling for Lucius Malfoy to be given the final solution, a kiss by a dementor. With Barty Crouch as Minister of Magic, Peter knew there was a very good chance that fate already awaited Lucius. By putting it in print first though, the Prophet would be ahead of the game once more and could claim a moral victory when the deed was finally carried out.

Peter had placed the Prophet at the forefront of the battle for changes in the British magical community, riding the wave of popular support for the reform measures that the ministry had pushed through. Those had been heady days and he could admit to himself they'd gotten complacent since, resulting in that disastrous report on the Dumbledore/Snape meeting. The fallout from the ministry and paper's owners was bad but the editor was shrewd enough to understand it would be the rift with PMP that could hurt the Prophet more in the long run.

The immediate financial loss of their advertising was a hard blow to adsorb yet it paled into insignificance when Peter considered the story opportunities this rift had already cost his newspaper. Peter glanced down at the magazine lying on his desk, a magazine that Peter would hardly admit to himself was in a large part responsible for the look of today's Prophet. He'd never considered the Quibbler to be a serious threat to his business before, it was after all a weekly publication, though the Prophet's editor was perfectly happy to copy the innovative designs and layouts Lovegood had pioneered. The latest issue had set mental alarm bells ringing, having just outsold their sister publication Teen Witch Weekly. One glance at the Quibbler and it wasn't hard to see why.

Their lead story, covering PMP's recording of the professional quidditch game and subsequent broadcast to the students of Hogwarts, was on the front, back and five pages inside. Peter really had to take his hat off to Lovegood for covering all the angles, something else he was happy to tuck into his subconscious to be used later.

The live WWN radio broadcast from the Hogwarts event had certainly caught the magical public of Britain's imagination, and here was the only place they could read reports of the event, interviews with people there from students to the minister and view pictures of it. That the Quibbler also contained a full page advert for the new PMP communication mirrors just rubbed salt into the open wound that was the Prophet's lost business.

Peter considered it a major part of his remit as editor to keep his newspaper at the forefront of everything that was happening inside magical Britain, something hard to do when their society's most innovative company declared them persona non grata. It was only after studying the paper's files on PMP that it hit the editor just how big a gaff they had actually made, that and Remus Lupin's comment to Madam Bones about 'the Family' meeting gave him the clue needed. A quick crosscheck on the head of the DMLE's file supplied the final answer.

It would appear the children had all been raised practically as one large family and, with the inclusion of the Longbottom boy and Lovegood girl, it all began to make sense. The Prophet had used many column inches over the years painting Albus Dumbledore as black as any dark lord, only to then unthinkingly give this self same criminal vital information on what were apparently his two main targets. That these targets were two young boys that all members of PMP also considered family left the paper totally screwed, and its editor with no idea how to repair the damage.