Pittsburgh television station WTAE-TV has cut all ties with veteran anchor Wendy Bell, an award-winning journalist who had been with the station for 18 years.
The firing followed a controversial post left by Bell on her Facebook page.
It was on March 21 that Wendy Bell created a post surrounding the March 9 mass shooting at a cookout that left five people, including a pregnant woman and her unborn child, dead.
Bell’s post read, “You needn’t be a criminal profiler to draw a mental sketch of the killers who broke so many hearts two weeks ago Wednesday … They are young Black men, likely teens or in their early 20s. They have multiple siblings from multiple fathers and their mothers work multiple jobs. These boys have been in the system before. They’ve grown up there. They know the police. They’ve been arrested.”
Naturally the post began a series of backlash on social media, with ‘young Black men’ trending on Twitter.
Following the incident, Wendy Bell took a planned vacation with her family, and never returned to the anchor-desk.
“It makes me sick,” she told the AP on Wednesday [March 30, 2016]. “What matters is what’s going on in America, and it is the death of Black people in this country… My stories, they struck a nerve. They touched people, but it’s not enough. More needs to be done. The problem needs to be addressed.”
