A large sealed envelope suddenly dropping onto the table in front of him startled Harry. He looked up and saw a grey eagle owl just settling on to the table in front of him. He offered the owl some of his bacon as he carefully turned the envelope over.
The front of the envelope just had: Harry Potter written on it and the handwriting looked familiar and the envelope seemed to be stuffed full. However given that he hadn't been expecting anything, Harry did several detection spells on it looking for hexes, traps, or any other nasty surprises. He remembered very clearly the booby-trapped letters that Granger had received during their fourth year after Skeeter's article had come out about her and suspected the angry Gryffindors might have decided to try and do the same thing to him. Since the spells detected nothing dangerous, Harry slit the envelope open with a nearby knife and poured the contents on the table.
There were a number of cut out articles and a small note. A quick glance at the note reminded Harry of the request he'd made to Alex after Fudge's attempt to award him the Order of Merlin a few weeks ago. He's asked him to send him copies of any articles that came out about Minister's attempt to give him that award and its fallout, since he didn't want to have to track down each story/paper personally. He'd been curious to know if any of the reporters would report what happened accurately or if they would they put their own personal spin on it. If he were to judge by the glares of his fellow students over the past few days, then some of the reporters had put their own personal spin on it, or else they didn't like hearing the truth about themselves.
He expected Rita Skeeter to run her own personal smear campaign, especially after he outed her as an animagus. He was willing to bet that she was going to find it much harder to get into places she shouldn't be, given that anti-animagi wards had probably been put up all over the Ministry and anywhere else that someone wanted to keep her out of. He wondered if she would manage to stay out of prison.
The article on top appeared to be the whole front page of the Daily Prophet and the headline on it said: Boy-Who-Lived Accuses Minster And Ministry Of Corruption! And in a smaller headline: Fudge accused of Knowing about He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named's return for over a year before announcing it to the public! Actually, Harry reflected, as he skimmed the article, I accused the whole wizarding world of being corrupt, not just the idiot Fudge. They got the second part right though.
Certain sections jumped out at him like: Boy-Who-Lived-And-Destroyed-Voldemort refused to accept the Order of Merlin from Fudge… Minister Fudge accused by Boy-Who-Lived of knowing about the Dark Lord's return since the end of the Tri-Wizard tournament.… Boy-Who-Lived accuses Minister and Ministry of sending more than one innocent person to jail by failing to use all tools at their disposal to get to the truth.
Harry noticed that none of the reporters made mention of his accusing the wizarding world itself of hypocrisy or the fact that he had told them that he would have left the wizarding world to deal with Voldemort on their own, if it hadn't been for those who couldn't defend themselves against the Dark Lord and the fact that he wanted justice for those the bastard had killed. Most of the clippings were practically identical, though some of them contained calls for Fudge's resignation and others wanted an investigation of the Ministry justice system, given that at least four innocent people had been sent to Azkaban in the last hundred years. He doubted anything would come of it, and given the rather convenient way the wizarding world had of ignoring anything that didn't directly affect them, he was fairly sure that innocent people would continue be sent to Azkaban.
At least they won't have to worry about the Dementors now. Harry thought to himself. I wonder if they'll employ regular wizards or try to find something as bad as the Dementors to guard the island.
The only article that reported the happenings at the award ceremony accurately was the Quibbler, but even they'd glossed over Harry's intention to leave the Wizarding world at the end of the year. He guessed they couldn't conceive of any wizard wanting to live in a non-magical world. Well they were going to be in for a rude awakening.
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