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what needs to be added to this is the magnitude of the falsehood. i.e Hipkins was "mostly false" by a dollar for the price of an NZ block of butter in Australia. Luxon was "mostly false" about Labour having an $18 billion fiscal hole, which is 18 billion (10 orders of magnitude) times worse

hipkins: lies about the price of butter ($1) luxon: lies about Labour's budget ($18 billion) political journalists (intellectuals): "you see? both are liars"

never mind that Hipkins' falsehood was an error, a failure to account for a currency difference (despite $1 AUD to an Australian being practically equivalent as $1 NZD to an NZer) and Luxon's is a whopper of a lie, something he simply must know to be untrue, and the press equivocates them as "false"

as you know Josh we cannot say things are lies as that is defamatory! All we can judge is the truthfulness of a statement. (and, like you say, the magnitude, but readers are perfectly capable of doing that too. the service we bring here is the research to actually check the claims.)

yes I know why the press is legally cautious, but you can still assign magnitude to things, as that falls under honest opinion. The magnitude of falsehoods matter, esp. given the false equivocation that Newsroom gives them in the headline - which as you know, lots of readers don't read past

I think this would be a fair criticism if this was our only coverage of the campaign! But we have done plenty of coverage from a range of approaches, including analysis which contextualises policies and claims. No one was fact-checking the debates, so we decided to add that to our roster.