TEGNA has launched an internal review into a news story published by its Portland, Oregon station on Thursday that led to the firing of a young sports broadcaster, The Desk has learned.
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.
The story concerned tweets Bell wrote when he was a teenager, some of which included remarks that were sexist and misogynistic. The station admitted it was unable to find any evidence of similar comments made by Bell on social media as an adult.
The station began looking into Bell shortly after the Portland Trail Blazers announced he was hired to serve as the team’s newest play-by-play broadcaster, an offer that was withdrawn after Haskins brought Bell’s social media posts to the team’s attention.
The story ignited a firestorm of controversy directed mainly at KGW, Haskins and Tierney. The journalists removed contact information from their social media profiles early Friday morning, and Haskins subsequently deleted his X.com (formerly Twitter) profile after some Internet sleuths began resurfacing his own controversial posts.
Bell issued his own apology Friday afternoon, saying the tweets he posted as a teenager were wrong and “have no reflection of who I am today.”
Haskins and Tierney have not commented on the matter. A spokesperson for TEGNA has not yet returned an after-hours e-mail seeking comment on the company’s investigation.
In a follow-up story on Friday, KGW-TV said its original report “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.”
The station didn’t mention that most of the public’s criticism was directed at its two journalists, and not at Bell, and that most of the discussion centered on whether it was appropriate for the station to dig through social media posts a person made when they were underage.
“Looking up old tweets when someone was 15 and reporting on them like it’s breaking news is journalistically indefensible,” Clay Travis, the founder of OutKick who sold his website to Fox News Media, wrote in a tweet on Friday.
Kyle Clark, a news anchor who works for KGW-TV’s sister station KUSA (Channel 9) in Denver, said the story was “out of bounds,” while sports journalism professor Paola Boivin remarked that Bell’s “tweets at 15 do not reflect the person I know.”
“I’m a big believer in not letting a poor decision or short time span define a person’s body of life work. I used to be more righteous,” Boivin wrote on Friday. “As I matured, I learned decisions in youth are often driven by bravado or surroundings.”
A knowledgeable source at TEGNA admitted KGW-TV looked into Bell’s “publicly-available” social media posts while conducing background research on him, and said the station likely would have withheld the story for publication in order to give Bell ample time to account for his past comments.
But things changed after the Trail Blazers publicly announced Bell’s firing. The station was unwilling to wait out the possibility that another news outlet might publish the reason for the firing first, so they elected to run their own story three hours before their regular newscast.
The rush to publish after the firing was announced made it clear that KGW-TV’s motivations were competitive, not journalistic, in nature. The likelihood that someone would have connected Bell’s firing to his prior social media posts was high, and the station did not want to be “scooped” on a story that it had been working on already.
One source at KGW-TV, who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter and feared repercussions for doing so, said Tierney initially defended the story in conversations with other newsroom staffers.
“He acted like it was a huge breaking news story, and you could tell he was pretty proud of it, like it was going to earn him an Emmy or something,” the source in a phone call on Friday.
On Friday, amid intense public backlash, “it became clear that the newsroom was split on whether (Tierney and Haskins) handled things the best way.”
“It comes across as creepy to look through someone’s tweets when they were 15, and it’s hard to defend the story when there’s literally no other evidence that (Bell) did anything else racist or wrong or whatever,” the source affirmed.
The story has made the environment inside the Portland newsroom more tense than anything else: Many journalists at KGW-TV have spent the past year wondering if they will still have jobs after TEGNA was acquired by Nexstar Media Group in March. An ongoing legal challenge launched by several state attorneys general has resulted in TEGNA being operated as a separate, independent entity within Nexstar’s business for now.
“Pissed off people calling our station every few minutes doesn’t really help things,” the source said.
