German state broadcaster ZDF has called back its US correspondent in New York, blaming her for an incident in which an AI-generated clip was aired in the company’s main news programme heute journal.
“Our review concludes that the violations of ZDF guidelines and journalistic standards are so serious that New York foreign correspondent Nicola Albrecht will be dismissed with immediate effect”, the TV behemoth announced today.
ZDF editor-in-chief Bettina Schausten said: “The damage caused by ignoring journalistic rules is serious.”
She added that the broadcaster would elaborate a catalogue of measures to insure that journalistic standards would be respected in the future.
On February 15, ZDF had aired a news segment on the practises of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), blaming the agency among other things for “taking parents away in front of their children’s eyes”.
The segment was illustrated with a short clip depicting dramatic detention scenes.
It later emerged that the clip had been generated using Artificial Intelligence (AI), specifically using the generative video platform Sora by AI company OpenAI. The video even bore the Sora watermark.
Another video shown in the segment turned out do be four years old and was shown in a misleading context.
The state broadcaster subsequently promised to review the affair.
Now ZDF admits to serious breaches of journalistic standards: “The AI-generated material should not have been used without journalistic justification and without classification in accordance with ZDF’s internal rules on the use of AI-generated material,” it said.
“A review of the other video scene and its origin, as required by journalistic standards, was not carried out. The final editors of the heute journal should have noticed the AI-generated image sequence when approving the report.”
Fifty-year-old Albrecht has been working for ZDF since 2001. She worked as a correspondent in Afghanistan, Peking and Tel Aviv before becoming the company’s New York correspondent in January 2025.
It was not clear whether she would continue to work for ZDF.
Brussels Signal reached out to ZDF but had not heard back at the time of writing.
The AI affair is not the first time the state broadcaster has been accused of dubious practices.
In October 2025, it was revealed ZDF had collaborated with Hamas members in its reporting on the war in Gaza.
In May 2025, the broadcaster’s house comedian came under fire for leaking the identity of a prominent anonymous YouTuber on air.
