Tuesday, December 27, 2016

Comfort news

It gained quick circulation as a version of what happened in the final minutes of the Berlin truck rampage: the original driver of the hijacked truck, Lukasz Urban, was still in the cab and struggled with Anis Amri to the last, saving more lives.

There's just one problem: it's virtually impossible that this happened.

German investigators have determined that Urban was shot in the head hours before the rampage and had already suffered massive blood loss by the time it occurred; even if he was still alive, there was no way he was struggling with Amri.

Now, this isn't an example of fake news -- a widely abused term that used to mean manufacturing viral-potential information that is known to to be false. But it is an example of news that people wanted to be true despite what one or two skeptical questions might have told them. Hence, comfort news.

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