The One Ring wrote:Apparently one of our radio djs yesterday did a riff on the new Harry Potter in an afternoon talk show and pretended to reveal which of the characters died. I didn't hear the show so I don't know which character it was, and when they were talking about it today they were not permitted to repeat what he had said. But it seems that his riff talked about reading the book, saying it was only 40 pages long, and [character x] does die in a car accident on I-95! And then he went on to describe Hermione's reaction to the death by repeating some well-known scene from the Sopranos or something like this.
It was supposed to be so obviously not true that people would laugh.
The talk show is aimed at adults, by the way; it's not a children's show, judging by the language. But it seems that a lot of kids (teenagers probably) heard this, and thought that the dj had really revealed the ending of the new Harry Potter book, and there was a storm of parents down at the radio station demanding that the dj be fired.
And ... guess what? The management put him on a one-day suspension for spoiling Harry Potter.
Another day in the life of popular culture!
The modern day equivalent of The War of the Worlds! Somehow I don't think that Orson Wells got a one-day suspension for causing mass panic about the invasion of the Martians. This says something about how things have changed in the past 70 years, but I'm not sure I want to speculate about exactly what it says.