Local daily Utusan Malaysia has made headlines again. This time, for falling for a fake headline.
The Malay-language daily fell for a piece on a satire website and published a rewrite of it on Sunday, attracting a horde of critics.
In no time, the newspaper issued an apology on its website for publishing a story about a Catholic priest who had converted to Islam upon waking from a coma.
The original article, which claimed that a Catholic priest from Spain named Eduardo Vincenzo Maria Gomez, 87, had a shift in faith after a 17-month coma, was published by World News Daily Report (WNDR) a satire website.
The article claimed that the Catholic priest living in Java, Indonesia, was ‘shown the beauty of the heavens’.
“Utusan apologises for any inconvenience and confusion following the publication of news on the site,” Utusan said in its apology.
The article has since been taken down.
In WNDR rings a bell, that’s because they’ve been in our news before. Recently, the fake news portal published an article on a Malaysia Airlines plane being forced to make an emergency landing after flying over an Icelandic volcano.
Malaysia Airlines was not pleased, obviously, calling the publishers ‘amateurish’.
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READ: MAS slams fake news report about plane flying over volcano
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