OUT OF CONTROL

Qatar World Cup Officials Censor Live TV Interview With Fan in Wheelchair

The TV broadcast was cut short as the officials demanded to see the reporter’s credentials.

An Argentinian reporter’s live interview with a wheelchair user at the soccer World Cup in Qatar was cut short when officials appeared and demanded the crew stop filming. Journalist Joaquin Alvarez was speaking to the soccer fan for the popular Nosotros a la Mañana TV show when three officials crashed the conversation, ordering Alvarez to produce his media credentials and making the cameraman point his lens away from the fan. “This is what the Qatar government is like,” Alvarez’s colleagues said in the studio in Buenos Aires. The reporter later resumed filming in the back of a car, explaining he’d been told to leave the area where he had been working earlier because it is “private.” “I was frightened and thought they were going to take me prisoner,” he added. “This is an example of severe censorship and we have to say so,” his colleague Nicolas Magaldi remarked.