The world is getting ready for a new era of Harry Potter storytelling – a TV series to be released in a few years on the Max streaming platform. The hiccup? The series author, J.K. Rowling, who has alienated a portion of her fanbase with certain tweets about transgender people.

Each week, Ad Fontes Media chooses a widely covered trending news topic to share insight into how our analysts rank news coverage for the Media Bias Chart®. To do this, we select six articles reporting on the same story from different outlets to show how each treated the subject.

Once we choose a set of articles, pods of analysts with diverse political perspectives (one right leaning, one center, and one left leaning) read each article and use Ad Fontes Media’s content analysis methodology to determine its bias and reliability. These ratings inform the articles’ placement on that week’s special Media Bias Chart.

This week, the story is an exciting new chapter in several aspects. First, Warner Brothers Discovery has unveiled that it will be remaking the Harry Potter series into ten years of programming, the new format allowing for a deeper delve into the storylines of the books. The show is roughly scheduled to air in 2025-2026 on the Max streaming service. The thing that folks – especially Potter fans – are mad about is that J.K. Rowling will be working on the show as an executive producer, and Rowling has a turbulent relationship with those fans for her very public statements critical of transgender people. If this information is new to you, I encourage you to read this NPR article that came out in June 2020 as a response to Rowling’s initial tweets.

Our analyst team took a closer look at several articles from various media outlets on this topic: “‘Harry Potter’ TV Series On Max: Everything We Know About The Cast, Release Date, What J.K. Rowling Says & More” from Deadline, “Harry Potter show moving forward at Max, with J.K. Rowling “expected to be involved”” from Winter is Coming, ““We don’t want a series”: J.K. Rowling Returns To New Harry Potter Project, Here’s Why Fans Don’t Want it” from Fandom Wire, “Media Melts Down Over So-Called ‘Transphobe’ J.K. Rowling’s Creative Control of New ‘Harry Potter’ Series” from Western Journal, “Well, the ‘Harry Potter’ Show Is Still Happening With ‘She Who Shall Not Be Named’” from The Mary Sue, and “J.K. Rowling Attacked As ‘Known Transphobe’ In Unhinged Tweet By Popular Film Account” from Outkick. The bias and reliability scores for each of these articles can be found on our Topic of the Week page. We will be looking closer at the articles from The Mary Sue and Outkick.

The Mary Sue was founded in 2011 and bills itself as “the geek girl’s guide to the universe” among an inclusive, feminist community of people. Using the Interactive Media Bias Chart (IMBC), to view the articles that we have rated from this site, The Mary Sue’s aggregate score for reliability is 30.21, placing it in the “opinion or wide variation in reliability” category, and for bias is -15.53, placing it into the “strong left” category. This week’s article scored 29.33 for reliability and -13.67 for bias, placing it in those same categories on the media bias chart.

Our analysts identified this article as an opinion piece, and it is easy to see why. “The maligned author has continued to act like a victim, blaming cancel culture on her demise instead of listening to the generation who gave Rowling the fortune she hides behind. Max’s new Harry Potter series, which is going to recreate the books in a more detailed manner, is not exactly an appealing idea. Especially with Rowling attached… Watching anything Potter related is giving money to Rowling no matter which way you look at it. I don’t want her to make more money off of me, and many others feel that way too.” This author’s opinion reflects a sentiment shared by many Potter fans, whether they agree with calling Rowling a victim or highlighting that they helped pay for the empire that she sits on or not.

“We will never be free of J.K. Rowling when it comes to Harry Potter. The franchise, which launched in 1997, was a staple for many millennials growing up, myself included. Now, it has been tarnished by Rowling’s transphobic rhetoric, which she continues to double down on.” How to handle works by problematic authors is a concept that has recently gained momentum, but to which there is no simple answer. The author of this article has expressed her hurt by Rowling’s stance against a community to which she belongs, and for her, that is a hard stop at any future support.

Outkick was also founded in 2011, and bills itself as a publication that “drives the national conversation about sports and American culture [by] questioning the consensus and exposing the destructive nature of “woke” activism. OutKick is the antidote to the mainstream sports media that often serves an elite, left-leaning minority instead of the American sports fan.” Using the IMBC to view the articles that we’ve rated from this site, its aggregate reliability score is 27.47, placing it in the “opinion or wide variation in reliability” category, and its bias score is 13.64, or “strong right.” The scores from this week’s article placed it at 30.67 for reliability (still squarely in the opinion range) and 10.67 for bias, in the “skews right” category but still close to “strong right.”. .

You may have an idea of where this article is headed from that intro, but “J.K. Rowling, once again, is the target of the woke mob for believing men and women are different.” A stark contrast from the previous article, this is mainly screenshots of social media posts interspersed with a few sentences of inflammatory rhetoric. “Wanting to protect women’s spaces and believing in biology now makes you a bigot in the eyes of the woke mob (it doesn’t at all in reality to normal people)… I hope HBO’s upcoming “Harry Potter” series is a massive success. I’m going to watch it no matter what because I’m a huge “Potter” fan, but at this point, the meltdowns from the woke mob will be worth it alone.”

This article references the “woke mob” often enough that I’d like to revisit the topic of using “boogeyman” that we last discussed in the August 2023 “Booked in Georgia” blog post. “Boogeyman” refers to people or groups whose names are invoked to incite fear, anger, or loathing among a certain audience. These could be real people or groups that have been labeled by one side or the other and evolve into “boogeymen” when their names are used as abstractions of that sentiment. It is an example of “language” bias — a subfactor our analysts use when rating articles for overall bias. In this case, mention of a mob conjures a certain violent image, which this article then steers toward the left. A woke mob. Scary but vague.

These are just two examples of the thousands of articles our analysts have rated for reliability and bias. If you want a look at the larger media landscape or are curious to see how our analysts have rated your favorite sources, head on over to our website and check out the resources we have available. And don’t forget to come back for another examination of our Topic of the Week.

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Sara Webb is a cybersecurity consultant and former high school librarian from Philadelphia, PA. She holds an M.S. in Informatics and an M. Ed in School Library and Information Technology, and has been a media literacy educator for over a decade. Sara started with Ad Fontes Media in July 2020 as a Media Analyst, and she currently continues in that role and as in-house Media Literacy Specialist. When not engrossed in media literacy projects, Sara can be found at the barn with her ex-racehorse Homer, or training her corgis for dog agility competitions.