29-year-old Braiden Bell was announced as the new TV play-by-play voice of the Portland Trail Blazers on Thursday morning.
By Thursday evening, the NBA franchise announced it was moving on from Bell after discovering several offensive social media posts he wrote as a teenager.
“The Portland Trail Blazers have zero tolerance for racist, sexist, or harmful comments,” the team said in an official statement posted to social media. “Social media posts made by our recently announced play-by-play broadcaster are in clear violation of team and league policies, as well as our values and expectations. Therefore, we will not be moving forward with this broadcaster.”
The offending tweets from 2012 and 2013 were first discovered by KGW reporter Devon Haskins.
“KGW was in the process of reporting a story on the tweets Thursday afternoon and reached out to the Blazers for comment,” the initial report reads. “The team replied several hours later, saying they had fired Bell.”
The KGW report noted that it didn’t find “any offensive tweets from Bell after he became an adult.”
The whole situation ignited a firestorm of criticism over how it unfolded. Some felt that the racist and misogynistic posts crossed a line. Others felt it was unreasonable to hold Bell accountable for what he’d said when he was 14, and that he deserved a chance to explain or apologize before losing his job over it.
Things were further complicated when critics dug into Haskins’ social media history and found some offending posts of his own. Both Haskins and KGW assistant news director John Tierney, who was also involved in reporting the initial story, removed contact information from their X profiles, presumably because they were inundated with pushback over the report. Haskins later deleted his X profile altogether.
According to TheDesk.net’s Matthew Keys, TEGNA, which owns KGW-TV, has launched an internal review of the reporting.
“The investigation focuses on whether KGW-TV (Channel 8, NBC) and its two journalists, news director John Tierney and sports reporter Devon Haskins, follow the company’s editorial processes with respect to researching and reporting a story involving social media posts made by former WNBA sports broadcaster Braiden Bell,” wrote Keys.
Were Haskins and KGW wrong to look through Bell’s social media history and then craft a news story around it? That’s up for debate, and part of a larger conversation around the value (or lack thereof) of a person’s social media history, especially before they were an adult.
Another aspect is worth questioning: why did the Trail Blazers fire Bell immediately? No one asked them to take the information KGW presented and cut Bell loose less than a day after announcing his arrival. And had the Blazers not fired him, would that change the value of the reporting? Is it KGW’s responsibility to report or not report something on a public figure when it could have repercussions beyond their control?
These are some of the cornerstone questions of journalism. They make for uncomfortable conversations, but they’re still worth having as we navigate new worlds where our internet footprints get longer and longer.