PETALING JAYA: Communications and digital minister Fahmi Fadzil has called out opposition leader Hamzah Zainudin for citing a “report” by a little-known Italian website called Agenzia Nova in the Dewan Rakyat yesterday.
The Lembah Pantai MP questioned the credibility of the source as the website was not even on a Reuters list of news outlets in Italy.
“Guess what? Agenzia Nova isn’t even on the list!
“What is this (Italian) Agenzia Nova website that he was citing? Does it have any credibility?” he said in a Facebook post.
The Lembah Pantai MP said he thought Hamzah would have cited a proper news portal or agency of the same “level” as Bernama, the BBC or the New York Times.
“Turns out to be some obscure website. They don’t even state the name of the reporters who write their articles,” he said, adding that Hamzah should not try to “scam” the people.
Yesterday, a shouting match erupted in the Dewan Rakyat after Hamzah cited an Agenzia Nova report which referred to Anwar Ibrahim as Malaysia’s “first full-blown homosexual elected prime minister in an Islamic country”.
This prompted Pakatan Harapan (PH) MPs to urge Hamzah to retract his statement.
Hamzah dismissed their calls and told them to let him finish his sentence, saying he wanted to ask Anwar if he would take legal action against Agenzia Nova.
The Larut MP then trained his guns on the government for policing content on social media platform TikTok over allegedly racially-charged content that had implicated Perikatan Nasional (PN) supporters as perpetrators.
Hamzah said the government’s actions went against PH’s election pledge to ensure media freedom.
