TV Reporter Claims Cameraman ‘Sabotaged’ Him With Embarrassing Video Of Him Sitting On Flood Victim’s Shoulders

Here’s a bizarre one: a TV journalist in India is taking lots of heat for video which shows him delivering a report from on a deadly flood while seated upon the shoulders of a survivor.

This week’s massive floods in Northern India has killed at least 800 people and damaged countless homes. News Express reporter Narayan Pargaien took to the field to survey the damage and report on the scene.

In filing that report, Pargaien made the bizarre decision to deliver his standup while perched atop the shoulders of a local resident.

In an interview with the News Laundry blog, Pargaien said the shoulder-based report came about when a local storm survivor who showed him around the damage offered to carry him across a flooded river. He complied “out of respect” for the “insistent” storm victim and even gave the man 50 rupees for his services.

“I have received a lot of flack, as you know,” Pargaien told the blog. “But the intention wasn’t what the media has portrayed it to be. People are talking about us being inhuman and wrong but we were actually helping some of the victims there.”

Pargaien claims the criticism has been unfair. “On the one hand what I did was journalistically wrong,” he conceded, “but how it’s being portrayed now … like a joke, doesn’t feel like it’s fair.”

He then blamed the cameraman for how this all turned out:

“[T]he report was supposed to be telecast only with footage of me chest-up. This was entirely the cameraman’s fault, who, it seems, almost tried to sabotage my career by shooting from that distance and angle and releasing the video mocking this whole incident, and making me the villain. […] Releasing that video, with the intent of it being harmful to me, or mocking me, was wrong on his part. It could cost me my career.

Watch the footage below:

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