A German reporter has been suspended from her TV station after smearing herself with mud before broadcasting from a flooded town. Susanna Ohlen, who works for RTL’s
Good Morning Germany program, said she had been helping with clean-up efforts in the days preceding the broadcast but felt ashamed to be neat as a pin on camera while reporting from a mud-covered street, the
BBC reports. She can be seen in a video posted to
Twitter bending over, putting her hands into the mud, and touching her clothes and face. The video, not part of the broadcast, was shot by a bystander.
Ohlen has since apologized, issuing a statement on Instagram. “As a journalist, this should never have happened to me. As a person who cares about the suffering of all concerned, it happened to me,” she wrote. "Our reporter's approach clearly contradicts journalistic principles and our own standards,” RTL wrote in a statement. Ohlen had been reporting on the aftermath of devastating flooding that killed more than 200 people in Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. (More flooding stories.)