Fake News - What Santa And The Dying Child Story Teaches Us About Fake News, Data And Verification

In this feature article, Forbes tackles the Fake News phenomenon, having been inspired by the viral story about a Santa Claus actor who held a dying child in his armsb - a powerful holiday story.  As "some of the world’s most prestigious and reputable news outlets took a moment this week to carry the heartwarming story," including CNN, BBC, the Washington Post, and NBC, and ran them alongside articles that highlight to citizens that they need to verify information to protect themselves from "fake news," the article poses questions about these reputable publications and the irresponsibility of reporting. An important question is brought up about the justifications offered after the fact - that it really was the fault of the publication who published the original story, as they should have done the fact-checking, or the "due diligence," themselves. The others simply assumed the story had already been verified, but the concerning result is that via what the article calls a "giant game of telephone," the wider community comes to accept this story as fact.

Here is an excerpt from the piece:

"Here, it appears that each news outlet covering this story simply assumed that the one before had performed the necessary fact checking and as the number of major outlets covering the story grew, so too did its perceived trustworthiness, as readers assumed that all of these outlets had independently verified the details, subjecting it to an ever greater collection of fact checking and verification.

At the end of the day, we simply don’t know if this heartwarming story is true or false or somewhere in between and the Santa Claus actor at the heart of the story stands firmly by his account. However, what we do know is that of the myriad news outlets covering the story, including some of the world’s best-known and most reputable brands in journalism, not one of them made even the most basic of efforts to verify the story before publishing it, content instead to happily spread a viral feel-good holiday narrative. "

Forbes Article