A journalist interviewing disaster relief volunteers has been criticized for not showing respect and has been suspended, her employer, a local TV station, announced on its Weibo microblog Tuesday.

While talking to volunteers on Tuesday in Xiamen, a city in eastern China’s Fujian province, a Xiamen Media Group reporter — who has not been named — wore sunglasses and held up an umbrella for shade. Her sartorial choices were seen as disrespectful to her interviewees by many net users, who took to Weibo to vent their irritation.

“Never interviewing with sunglasses is the most basic etiquette,” wrote one user. Another user compared the reporter’s appearance to the heavy construction and labor happening around her, and wrote, “her dress was really incompatible.”

Coastal Xiamen was hit by Typhoon Meranti, the strongest yet this season, on Sept. 15. The storm left 622,000 households without electricity, and nearly 1.5 million households without running water. Disaster relief teams of government employees and volunteers have been working to restore normalcy to the city of nearly 4 million.

In the Tuesday statement, Xiamen Media Group said the journalist had disobeyed the media group’s regulations, violated professionalism, and “badly damaged the image of media reporters.”

The Xiamen Media Group could not be reached for further comment. An unnamed employee not authorized to speak on the matter told Sixth Tone that the journalist had been suspended for 6 months.

“In this particular case, it looks bad given that she’s interviewing a relief worker,” Wu Yanting, a lecturer at Shanghai International Studies University who specializes in broadcasting and journalism, told Sixth Tone. “She should be in a work mode rather than interviewing in such a casual manner.”

The journalist’s career isn’t the only professional casualty of Typhoon Meranti, which doused large parts of the country in heavy rain. When one government official in Taishun, a county in Zhejiang province in eastern China, was photographed being carried by two men across a swath of mud, he was promptly fired, Sixth Tone’s sister publication The Paper reported Friday.

The disgraced but clean-footed official told the Paper that although he felt treated unjustly, he had no choice but to accept the result.

In April 2013, Chen Ying, another female reporter, also raised viewers’ eyebrows for her choice of dress. Chen wore her wedding gown during a live news broadcast following a 7.0-magnitude earthquake. While some admired the journalist’s professional dedication in interrupting her own wedding to report breaking news, others questioned whether she really did not have time to change clothes.

This article has been updated to accurately reflect Wu Yanting’s comments. She said the journalist should be in “a work mode,” not “a work mindset.”

(Header image: The suspended journalist interviews a disaster relief volunteer, August 2016. @kanxiamen from Weibo)