Reuters corrects Najib house-arrest flash after premature verdict call sparks media scramble

Confusion rippled through Malaysian and international newsrooms on Monday after Reuters published an incorrect breaking-news flash claiming former Malaysian prime minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak had been granted house arrest.

According to a report by the New Straits Times, the flash appeared at 9.48am local time while High Court judge Alice Loke Yee Ching was still reading her ruling and had not yet delivered a verdict. The Reuters alert stated that the judge had ordered Najib released from jail for home arrest.

The court’s decision went the other way. Judge Loke dismissed Najib’s judicial review application seeking to enforce a purported royal addendum that would have allowed him to serve the remainder of his sentence under house arrest.

The erroneous Reuters flash was rapidly amplified. It was picked up by a range of outlets, including Singapore’s Straits Times and Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post. The Straits Times, the New Straits Times reported, ran the item prominently for more than 20 minutes before issuing a correction, noting that Reuters had since corrected its report and apologising for the error.

Malaysia’s deputy communications minister, Teo Nie Ching, later criticised the episode, urging outlets to compete on accuracy rather than speed and sharing screenshots of the incorrect headlines.

The incident captures a familiar failure mode in modern breaking news: the wire flash that outruns the underlying fact. When verdicts and market-moving rulings are reported in real time, a single premature line can become the story, even if it is wrong, because it is the first version many readers see.