Reporter Sean Bergin has quit News 12 New Jersey after the local station docked his pay for opinionated comments he made on-air this weekend about “young black men.”

As we reported on Tuesday, Bergin was briefly suspended by the network for reacting to a story about a local cop killer by telling audiences that the root cause of such crimes is: “Young black men growing up without fathers.”



The network has a strict policy against such editorialization, and so after some consideration, company brass gave Bergin — a contracted employee — what he told TheBlaze amounted to a “demotion.” In response, he walked.

It was “offer I had to refuse,” he said. “They offered me one day of work a week doing only light features, and no hard news. It was only about $300-a-week — who can survive on that?”

Bergin admitted to TheBlaze that he did break the rules by adding commentary to an otherwise straight news story, but he seems to feel he made the right choice:

“I broke the rules, but I broke the rules because I was doing the right thing,” he told TheBlaze. “You can’t fix a problem if you don’t talk about the problem. The truth is, 73 percent of African-American children grow up without fathers. It’s a topic that needs to be handled delicately — and really, this situation could have been used as a way to explore that.” But no one in the news media wants to touch the subject, Bergin argued. “I’m in these housing projects all the time, and it’s all for the same thing: black men slaughtering each other in the streets. Why is this happening?” he continued, adding that it’s nearly impossible to cover the issue in-depth and accurately when surrounded by “stark raving liberals who masquerade as journalists.”

Watch the initial remarks again below, via News 12 New Jersey:

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