TV reporter sacked after writing Facebook post praising Donald Trump

A TV reporter is out of a job after she criticised President Obama and praised President-elect Donald Trump on her personal Facebook page.

A TEXAS television reporter is out of a job after she criticised President Obama and praised President-elect Donald Trump on her personal Facebook page — claiming the country went “downhill” under the outgoing commander-in-chief.

Scarlett Fakhar said she was recently canned from her local news gig at Fox in Houston for posting last week that she was “happy and relieved” over Trump’s unexpected White House win.

Fakhar had said in the post, which has since been deleted, that Obama made the “entire county hate one another” and claimed God “had a hand” in the election. She also said she could “barely sleep from how happy and relieved she was” after Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton.

“Fox 26 Houston fired me today for expressing my conservative views on my private Facebook page,” Fakhar posted Thursday. “That is all I will say for you. But I want you to know how much your support has gotten me through this. God bless you all.”

A spokesman for KRIV confirmed to The Post that Fakhar, 25, was no longer with the station, but declined further comment.

Fakhar, who is originally from Wilmington, Delaware, graduated from Elon University in North Carolina with a degree in broadcast journalism, according to a biography on her Facebook page. Before joining the station last year, she worked at television stations in Austin and Lubbock, as well as internships at NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams in New York and at KTRK-TV in Houston.

Fakhar said she was “relieved” at Trump’s win. Picture: Facebook

After posting the message announcing her termination, Fakhar wrote a message claiming that FOX 26 was trying to get her to take down her “fan page” from Facebook.

Fakhar also singled out the “liberal” Houston Chronicle, claiming the newspaper wrongfully reported that she criticised African-Americans, a reference to Fakhar’s original problematic post that stated the “number of African-Americans killed one another far outweighs the number of them being killed by whites.”

“The media has made this a RACE issue when in reality the matter boils down to a difference in political philosophy,” Fakhar wrote Thursday. “As a multiracial person myself, I never have been or never will be racist. I simply stated the fact that the media continues to misrepresent the factual realities that there is NO more white on black crime than there is black on black crime.”

Fakhar’s post did not elaborate on her ethnicity.

She previously apologised on her personal Facebook page for making her “personal views” public after the election, saying it was “wholly inappropriate.” That post has also been deleted from her page, the Dallas Morning News reported.

Messages seeking additional comment from Fakhar were not immediately returned Friday.

A review of Fakhar’s Twitter feed shows several of her most recent stories, including an exclusive on a student who said he was attacked by classmates for voting for Trump in a mock election. She also called out what she claimed to be “media bias” in October when CNN’s Christopher Cuomo referenced Joseph McCarthy in connection to WikiLeaks disclosures that reporters at a number of outlets, including CNN, met in secret and co-ordinated with Clinton’s campaign.

This article originally appeared in New York Post and was reproduced with permission.

Originally published as TV reporter sacked after writing Facebook post praising Donald Trump