Why didn’t Stuff wait for a response?

As most readers will know, Stuff ran a story that said PM Luxon had asked the Samoan Government to give him a title.

This was a hugely damaging story. Anyone who read that would think incredibly poorly of Luxon.

It was false. This is beyond doubt. This has been confirmed by both Governments.

Now to be fair to Stuff, the Samoan PM did say that the NZ High Commissioner said that Luxon had asked for it. So that was newsworthy.

However where Stuff went wrong, was rushing out a story before they got a response from Luxon, MFAT etc. There was no journalistic justification for this. This was not an urgent story. Once upon a time media would put a negative allegation to someone for comment, before running a story. Why did Stuff not wait for a response from Luxon’s office and/or MFAT?

Did no one at Stuff think how unlikely it was that the claim was true, and that they should wait for a response before running a story that would lower the view of the PM in the eyes of anyone who saw it?

As it happened, the Samoan PM was wrong, or confused, or just making things up. If Stuff had waited for a response from MFAT and Luxon’s office, then they would have been able to run an accurate story. But instead they ran a story that many saw, and not all will have seen the later story. Even now there are many on social media who are quoting the original story, and spreading it.

It seems some claims need to be authenticated before publishing, but not others.

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