A sports broadcaster who lost his job with the Portland Trail Blazers before it even began is asking the team to reconsider their decision and has hired a lawyer to handle publicity on his behalf.
In a press release on Monday, 29-year-old Braiden Bell renewed his apology over social media posts that were made when he was a teenager, some of which contained racist and misogynistic messages.
The posts had been buried and long forgotten about until journalists from TEGNA-owned KGW-TV (Channel 8, NBC) unearthed and disclosed them late last week. The station conceded it reached out to executives at the NBA team shortly after they announced Bell was hired to fill a vacant spot spot on their broadcast team.
That outreach ultimately led the Trail Blazers to announce their decision to revoke an offer made to Bell and issue a public apology of their own. The statement did not initially make clear that Bell’s posts were written when he was underage.
KGW-TV’s sports reporter Devon Haskins and news director John Tierney published a story online about the tweets and the firing, noting that the station had reached out to team executives earlier in the day. Both posted about the matter on their own X.com (formerly Twitter) accounts, drawing anger from viewers and other social media users.
“Braiden is not asking anyone to excuse what he wrote,” Arnie Herz, a New York-area attorney retained by Bell, said in a statement. “He has owned it, without excuses. What he is asking is whether a boy’s words from fourteen years ago should outweigh everything the man has done since. If that is the standard, there is hardly a person in any organization in America who could meet it.”
In a follow-up story published over the weekend, KGW-TV said their initial scoop had “stoked an ongoing conversation as to whether individuals — public figures and otherwise — should face consequences years later for things they said online and might have since come to regret.”
But that mischaracterized the outrage that the story triggered from sports journalists, columnists, educators and the station’s own viewers, many of whom were upset at Haskins and Tierney for reporting on Bell’s tweets in the first place.
The initial story is now the subject of an internal review at TEGNA, The Desk reported on Friday. A source familiar with the company’s handling of the matter said KGW-TV merely reported on what was already “publicly available” on Bell’s X.com account, but said the station “likely” would have held the story to give Bell an appropriate amount of time to respond to his posts and would have sought the expertise of someone with a strong understanding of social media.
Haskins and Tierney are not working on any follow-up stories about Bell, according to newsroom sources. Haskins appeared on a KGW-TV newscast Friday evening after producing a story about artificial intelligence protests at Portland-area schools. The story involved Haskins interviewing teenagers for their thoughts on the matter, according to news footage reviewed by The Desk.
A significant amount of outrage was directed at the two journalists in the immediate hours after the first story broke: Dozens of upset social media users pored over Haskins and Tierney’s social media profiles, unearthing comments they made as adults that were of a similar nature to those made by Bell when he was a teenager.
Neither Haskins nor Tierney are expected to face discipline over the story or their prior social media posts, and both are still showing up to work, one newsroom employee said.
As an adult, and until last week, Bell was a prolific social media user, posting mostly about sports. Many of his comments were supportive of peers in the industry and of female athletes, including basketball players for the Phoenix Mercury, where he most recently called games.
In one post made during the pandemic, Bell explained why he endeared himself to sports.
“I love sports for many reasons, but one of them is the way they can unite us and also equalize us,” Bell said. “The unity part is pretty simple: The fact that a whole city, state, community or campus can rally around a group of athletes representing them is really special to me…when you’re at a sporting event, and you’re rooting for the same team, you’re almost bonded. It really doesn’t matter what race you are, what religion you believe in, political party you support or your social or economic background. For those three hours, you’re really on the same team.”
KGW-TV, notably, did not report on that social media post. Nor did the station mention that Bell, while in college, signed a letter supporting the ousting of student journalist Rae’Lee Klein from her leadership position at campus-run Blaze Radio after she made controversial remarks on her social media account about the shooting of an unarmed Black man in Wisconsin in 2020.
“Klein’s tweet was the latest example of a trope long used to dehumanize and insinuate blame on the victims of police violence,” the letter signed by Bell and nearly two dozen other former station leaders said. “We believe that, as long as Klein holds her post, students of color will not feel welcome in Blaze Radio; because of this, we believe she no longer represents the key principles of diversity and inclusion within the organization and is no longer fit to lead Blaze Radio.”
Despite the obvious online evidence that Bell’s adult life has been spent promoting diversity, equity, fairness and inclusiveness, the Trail Blazers appear unwilling to give him another chance: A team spokesperson told reporters on Monday that organization “stand(s) by our statement issued last week and (has) no further comment.”
Except the team did have one further comment: “We wish Mr. Bell the best.”
