The recent BBC2 Newsnight story about a Romanian living in a tent in Hyde Park, central London, carried little credibility for the British people too.
When the evening drops over Hyde Park, thousands of people pass by the Speaker's Corner on their way from work to home. This is the alleged time the BBC report was shot too, depicting a Romanian called Daniel sleeping in a tent set up in the park.
The report, however, was doctored, say journalists working for the only Romanian newspaper published in London, titled "Romani in UK" sRomanians in UKt. Two weeks prior to airing the report, the BBC journalists called the newsroom of the Romanian paper asking for contacts of Romanian citizens recently fined, said editor-in-chief Cristina Eremie.
The aim of the report, the BBC journalists said, was to establish the wrongful attitude of the British authorities towards Romanians.
"I refused to give them any names, but then they asked me for an interview," said Eremie. "I felt all the time that they wanted me to say certain things; I suspect they already had found that Daniel and now they needed a few people to support his statements."
"The surprise is they asked us to do the translation of the recordings they made with this Daniel of whom we knew nothing about," added Eremie.
"Daniel was very absent-minded during that interview with the BBC, and at one point he said he would be late because he wanted to take a shower; this meant that he had a place were to shower to. The BBC journalists told him to hurry and take a cab, because they would pay for it, and added to not forget his tent. We thought nothing of it at the time, since Hyde Park is a regular place for setting up meetings. The only thing we could do was to publish the following day our own account of how the BBC story was documented," said Eremie.
Workers in Hyde Park thought