But… but… grandma Betsy in Keokuk could just as easily get her news from Der Spiegel rather than fake news, right? I mean, all the unbiased sources are out there for the reading, and it’s totally not super confusing to tell the legitimate ones from the fake ones 
This is something Snopes would call glurge. In fact, I think they literally called this glurge. It’s soppy maudlin stuff for getting people’s feels up. I can’t really explain how it works or even (to me) what it does, but it’s psychically a lot to unpack.
Not only did he not name the hospital, he changed his story as to what part of Tennessee the hospital was in and how he got there. Had he not done that, nobody would have raised an eyebrow. From the looks of it, people needed this story to be true, so they wouldn’t have questioned it had red flags bit been raised.
Nothing happens outside the view of the cameras anymore. Surely someone would have come forward and said “yeah, Santa did this, he’s a really cool guy”, especially seeing how much publicity this is getting. Hospital staff, parents, anyone. Even though the parents presumably would have been grieving, they would have wound up in the story eventually, because of their closeness to it. They surely would be able to confirm or deny.
Speaking of which, what are their names? What is the kid’s name? The lack of a name for the kid is what led me to believe that this kid was just Nameless Faceless Plot Device #799A, cooked up solely to deliver a metaphorical crescent wrench to the feels. If the kid was real, then it would indeed be exploitative to not mention him and his life and instead focus on what a cool guy Santa was. Now that we know this story is probably fake, I feel a little better.
