(Newswire.net — September 9, 2015) — The ‘Worst Journalist Ever Award’ goes to a Hungarian N1 camera operator who engaged refugees who broke through a police cordon. She was first filmed in crowd kicking a boy, then a young girl who was holding her father’s hand.
ANother video showed the same woman tripping a man who was holding a small child in his arms. The man tumbled down on to the field, sprawling over the child.
Petra László, the camera operator under the unwelcome spotlight was an ENG crewmember of N1TV, Hungarian station linked to the country’s far-right Jobbik party. Jobbik leader Gábor Vona has made some inflammatory speeches regarding the refugees, and the channel’s website also contains articles with such headlines as “migrants have swarmed all over the shops” and “Guantanamo = Hungary?”
According to the station’s website, N1TV management offered its regrets for the “unacceptable behavior” of her staff member who was fired over the incident.
“The camerawoman’s employment has today been terminated with immediate effect, the case is now closed for us,” the channel’s editor in chief Szabolcs Kisberk said in a statement posted on the station’s website.
The short statement aggravated many people judging by the comments posted on Twitter and Facebook
Video published on a YouTube channel shows dozens of reporters and TV crew filming Syrian refugees at the Hungarian border hotspot of Rőszke, near the border with Serbia. There, a large numbers of presumed refugees from Syria broke through a Hungarian police cordon and ran for the nearby cornfield. By social media accounts, the case is a far from closed. A group of aggravated Facebook users even created a group “The Petra László Wall of Shame”.
László, a camera operator from N1TV, was filmed as she kicked a boy running away while she was still holding her camera. The kick was obviously intentional because immediately after kicking the boy she kicked a young girl running with her father. A subsequent video showed even more sinister behavior as Petra László was filmed intentionally tripping a man carrying a young boy, as he was running for a safety of a cornfield while police were chasing them. The video shows the man, after he is tripped by László, falling down on top of the child. The video ends there so it is not known if the child and his father were hurt or captured by the police.
Opposition parties, Együtt-PM and the Democratic Coalition, have said that they will initiate charges against László, for violence against a member of the community. The punishment threatened for such a felony is up to five years in prison, under Hungarian law.