The Tame Apple Press is doing its best to rain on Samsung’s Galaxy 8 parade as early indications suggest that it is going to be far better than what Apple is going to release in October.

Apple’s favourite news agency Reuters  took time out of its busy day to warn users of the dire “fire-prone Note 7” smartphone and demanded to know why the company was not focusing the launch on battery safety rather than concentrating on things like functionality and what the phone does.

It quoted a Los Angeles-based Eric Schiffer, a brand strategy expert and chairman of Reputation Management Consultants saying that highlighting the safety issue at this point will cause the other narrative to be recycled, “so they have elected to suppress and hope”.

To be fair to Samsung, only the Tame Apple Press thinks that the Samsung Galaxy 8 will catch fire. Reuters was finding it hard to dredge up a tame expert who would say that the batteries were a problem. Lewis Larsen, president of Chicago-based battery technology consultancy Lattice Energy said that Samsung had taken measures that should certainly improve battery safety and durability. “These are most definitely not just cosmetic steps ‘for show.'”

But that did not stop Reuters hacks interviewing their word processors to talk about how the new quality measures “can’t guarantee there will be no future problems”.

They even hinted that it did not matter if the failure rate was low at first, in the long term they would catch fire. Of course, they have no way of knowing that and if we were Samsung we would have sued them.

At the heart of the story is that analysts are going on record to say that the S8 will outsell the Galaxy S7, which was Samsung’s best seller in its first year from launch.

Reuters is recommending people not to buy it and to wait a few months to see if it does not catch fire. If people were stupid enough to listen to that advice then it would mean that it would give Apple a chance to release new iPhone as competition.

To put this into perspective, when Reuters covers iPhone launches it bangs on about how anticipated the phone is and focuses on its “game changing” technology, even when the iPhone’s tech has been unchanged for years with incremental changes to the chips, thinning down slightly, and the inconvenient loss of the headphone jack.