To the sibling, I add:

Anything to do with Harry Potter is obviously going to be a big deal in this world. He's not just a celebrity, he's a household name

Imagine if a newspaper IRL claimed that... I dunno, Bill Gates? .... had, say, Japanese ancestry, and they had incontrovertible proof of it. Also, they'd found secret intelligence that he was planning to start a war against Bhutan with the support of the Phillipines. And all of that turned out to be false. Might not kick up a scandal, but it'd sure kick up a wtf-storm and damage the newspaper's credibility.