Is the Santa Claus-dying kid story made-up b.s.?

St this point, if this clown show conjured a pair of dead kid parents, I would go full Sandy Hook truther on them.

 

Not for anything, but since 2009, I've seen Christmas displays in retail stores before Halloween (I have a very specific memory of the jaw-dropping moment I saw that display). My 4-year-old asks to read Christmas stories in August and he literally thinks the old guy with the long, white beard he saw in a diner over the summer is Santa Claus on vacation at the beach ("He doesn't have to give us gifts until it starts snowing!"). If this kid really existed, he was far, far from "the one 5-year-old already thinking about Christmas two weeks before Halloween."

Let's focus on the things that are really amiss here, such as the lack of an ID on the hospital or a background confirmation from, well, anyone. Santa could ID the hospital (and someone could confirm his military service) or a nurse or the family could easily confirm the veracity of his interaction with the child to a reporter without identifying the kid. Even worse, IMO, is the lack of oversight by the editorial staff who let this story pass without any such confirmation.

But the logic of a 5-year-old wanting to see Santa in October is so far down on the list of things that make this story sound fishy, it's not even worth mentioning.

 

You should take up your complaints with the OP. He led you down this road.

 

As ‘Viral Santa’ Changes His Story, There Are Many Unanswered Questions for Him and the Media

"So . . . [w]hy the hell did everyone run with this without a hint of restraint?!

"The short answer to that question is that the news media is totally broken and completely vulnerable to popular narratives which are not true, but which, at some level, make people feel good. No one bothered to verify the story because it wasn’t worth the time/effort/resources to do so when all you have to do is copy and paste the original version to ride the wave of a viral sensation."

 

I know. It was easy to breeze through once and fall for. It's like not realizing a word is misspelled because you read past it. You just kind of assume that the sourcing and so forth was all there. It wasn't until I went back to tell Mrs. Whitman where the kid was from - I had seen it in the Indy Star, and thought maybe it was an Indianapolis-area kid - and couldn't figure it out that I started to wonder what the hell was up.

 

Interesting. So viral Santa is a huge Trump fan and kind of racist message board commenter!

I wonder if Santa had someone else in his lap that night and had to concoct the dying kid story to throw Mrs. Claus off the scent.

 

Could not have said it better.

 

They ran with it because that's how it's been done from time immemorial. Newspaper runs a barely fact-checked story, it catches on because people love it, and no one has the means to disprove it. This was written by a 70-year-old columnist who adheres to old-school ways, I'd bet.

Now, it's not too difficult for the general public to verify a story. You would think the media wiuld figure this out by now, but with staffs slashed few have the time or energy to devote to that part of it.

 

OP: "If Trump wins Canada will build a " wall " and Americans will pay for it !! Santa"

Eric J. Schmitt-Matzen: "Great! The towel heads are coming across that border too!"

OP: "We disarm them at our border - we don't give them more weapons !!!"

Eric J. Schmitt-Matzen: "Don't need them, they go to the local store and buy pressure cookers and then everything else they need at a hardware to make bombs with."

 

By the way, kudos to John Ziegler, who wrote that Santa takedown. He is a right-wing nutjob and Sarah Palin's biggest fan, but he was willing to include Santa's racists posts. Probably just to establish a time frame, but still.

 

If he's going to be that super-sanctimonious about fact-checking and the lazy media, he probably should clean up the part where he consistently has Santa living in Knoxville, two counties away. (Puting the Penn St "scandal" in scare quotes does not make me feel warm and fuzzy either.)

 

Penn State "unpleasantness?"