Whichever way you look at it, the 30th of April 2020 is a sad day for the Malaysian media industry. First, news broke that popular media house Blu Inc Media Sdn Bhd has decided to call it quits. Like the the novel coronavirus, the MCO does not discriminate and life has been tough on media houses since it has been implemented.

Which leads us to the second reason that today is a big f**k you to the Malaysian media industry. For some strange reason, World Of Buzz (WOB) thought that it’d be a good idea to quite literally rip off an original investigative piece originally carried out by the team at R.AGE.

In a post on Facebook, Ian Yee, an investigative journalist/ producer at R.AGE, called out WOB, accusing them of stealing the video before going into detail on the amount of time and effort his team spent on creating the video.

He also shared the link to the original video, which was actually uploaded all the way back in 2017. Has the MCO made the team at WOB so bereft of ideas that they had to go all the way back to 2017 to find content?

Yee wasn’t the only one upset at World Of Buzz. Clarissa Say, a former member of the R.AGE team couldn’t believe the audacity of it all, taking to Facebook with some choice words for the team at WOB (her views on WOB are pretty on point, let’s be real here), before reiterating the amount of hard work the entire team at R.AGE put in to bring the story to life.

WOB has since deleted the video, probably to avoid an intellectual property case. While they may have been quick to delete the video, that haste is nowhere to be found when it comes to issuing a public apology. You might argue that this was a long time coming for WOB, and you wouldn’t be wrong.

The news portal seems to have made a name for itself by living in a world where plagiarism is smiled upon. Hopefully this is the wake up call they so clearly need.