The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) is picking a fight with Harry Potter. The film Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone made over $93 million in its first weekend, and CSPI has been riding the popularity of the film to push its anti-consumer agenda — specifically by using discredited charges to attack Coca-Cola’s literacy campaign connected with the film.
As Center For Consumer Freedom’s executive director writes in an op-ed published by Scripps Howard News Service, CSPI launched a website featuring “countless references to Harry and his friends” that rehashes a CSPI report attacking soda that “was so flawed that it had to be retracted and revised days after its release… All this comes courtesy of a group that has blasted the soft drink industry for ‘”predatory” marketing campaigns aimed at children and adolescents’ — exactly what the Center itself is doing in slamming Coke and Harry.” (For more on the campaign against soda, see our report Hop on Pop.)
