Czech daily misquotes police, falsely reports foreigner was robbed by "Romani people"

As has been said and written a hundred times before, articles in which Romani people are depicted in a negative light are a guarantee of high readership for the Czech media. Even though various media outlets have been embarrassed recently by reporting unverified information about Romani people in the past – such as the Parlamentní listy scandal, the alleged assaults in Břeclav, Tanvald, etc. – some journalists are apparently ineducable. What the “journalist” Jiří Sejkora of the Deník publication has just done does not resemble journalism in the least.

On Saturday, 28 July 2012, news server Deník.cz published an article with the following headline: “He came to the Czech Open from Belgium, Romani people robbed him in front of a bar.” (“Přijel na Czech Open z Belgie. Před barem ho okradli Romové.”) That’s a clear, short message, and the start of the article indicates what the author wants to tell us: “One of the Belgians who participated in the Czech Open international festival of chess and gaming in Pardubice will have a story to tell about multicultural coexistence back home. He will be going back with bruises, no mobile phone and no wallet. The man was drinking in the U Lišáka bar on Jana Palacha street with several others until approximately 3 AM.”

In the article, Sejkora bases his claim that the alleged perpetrators of the alleged crime were Romani people on a statement made by Eva Maturová, spokesperson for the Pardubice Police. “At around 3 AM the man wanted to go home and got into his car. He did not get a chance to break the law by driving under the influence. Two men of Romani nationality got into the back seat of the car without being invited,” Maturová is quoted as saying.

The police spokesperson’s statement surprised us and we called her to verify whether she had been accurately quoted. “He never said anything about their being Romani. He was unable to give us any description of them, or rather, the description he gave was that they were ‘typical Moroccan-type Czechs’. We have no idea what that means. We have to address this kind of thing with that reporter all the time. I would never in my life have uttered the sentence he quotes me as saying. I have asked him to correct it, but no correction has yet come out in the print version of Deník. It never even occurred to me that they would just leave it up online like that. I’m going to call him right now,” a distraught Maturová told news server Romea.cz.

Naturally, we were interested in what led Sejkora to misquote the police spokesperson. Here is how he described his strange reasoning to us: “I knew about this incident from my own sources, including an approximate description of the perpetrators, whom my sources described as having darker skin. It was literally specifically stated that they were Moroccans. I verified this with the police press department, where I confirmed the information about the robbery, along with the information that the victim really did describe the attackers that way. However, he said they spoke Czech. We must have not understood one another during the phone call, I admit that it’s probably my fault. After the consultation on Monday, we removed the disputed passage from the article. I understand why your news server is asking about this, but I can completely assure you that if the man had been assaulted in front of the bar by Martians, neo-Nazis, Slovaks, whoever, we would have reported that information. I do my best to apply the same standards to everyone.”

At this moment it is unclear whether the drunken chess player was actually even robbed. Many fabricated cases in recent days have proven that journalists should be careful about publishing the “truth” according to alleged crime victims. Sejkora made the same mistake that his colleagues have made many other times before him. He based his reporting solely on the claims of a drunken alleged victim, “corrected” that testimony, and calmly proceeded to falsely quote the police spokesperson. This truly has nothing in common with journalism at all and borders on intentional incitement of the public against Romani people. After two days of negotiation, the article was finally corrected online, thanks to the efforts of Romea.cz.