RedState reported Friday on the despicable actions taken by Portland's KGW news station that led to the firing of the new play-by-play announcer for the city's NBA team, the Trail Blazers, ahead of their home preseason opener against the Golden State Warriors.
To quickly recap, on October 1, the team named 29-year-old Braiden Bell as their new announcer. It was a big step up for Bell, who had previously called games for "the WNBA’s Phoenix Mercury and the G League’s Valley Suns." Bell was replacing veteran announcer Kevin Calabro, who had been with them for over 20 years. So this was potentially a lifelong dream career opportunity for him, and one he made clear he was eager to start. It was also one his friends and the Portland community congratulated him on.
But KGW "reporter" Devon Haskins dug up a handful of old tweets from Bell, written when he was 14 and 15 years old, where he made “misogynistic and racist comments." Haskins reached out to the Trail Blazers for comment, and before the story was even published, the team announced he had been fired.
Many on social media were rightly disgusted at this example of media-instigated cancel culture run amok, and proceeded to comb through the social media feeds of Haskins and KGW news director John Tierney, the latter of whom promoted the story on his X page, proud that they broke the "news." It freaked Haskins out so much that he has deleted his X page, probably because he is being held to the standard he held Braiden Bell to:
@KGWNews x @trailblazers explain the posts of the very reporter who got @braidenbellpxp fired then. @devonhaskins fam it’s 2026 you don’t think we see your hypocrisy. Explain YOUR racism then, since you felt so inclined to project it onto some young man’s career. pic.twitter.com/a6GHUUK8SG
— Whom (@WHYYOMAMASTANK) October 2, 2026
So brave, boys. Although if you had a shred of journalistic integrity, you would do some investigation on your own reporters tweets from years ago that are incredibly misogynistic and ageist. We must do better pic.twitter.com/G0JYIjGssZ
— Jake Woolsey (@weshouldrip) October 2, 2026
Around the same time that Braiden Bell was tweeting dumb things as a teenager, @KGWNews news director @jtierney6 was posting things like these on Instagram — as an adult.
— Matthew Keys (@MatthewKeysLive) October 3, 2026
(At the time, he worked as a news producer for KATU, the ABC affiliate in Portland.) pic.twitter.com/ccNFpJ1C6i
And, surprise, surprise, Tierney is a cancel culture fan:
— Ralph Amsden (@ralphamsden) October 2, 2026
Something that also should be questioned here is what was the journalistic value in this reporting? When one writes a story, it has to have a purpose, which usually is to serve the community, the public. Did it do that in this case? Bell isn't running for office, nor does he already hold public office, nor is he in any other type of position of power or influence.
So there was no rational justification for digging through his old tweets, something that Haskins and his colleagues who co-wrote the story accidentally admitted when they noted towards the end of the piece they wrote that Bell hadn't written anything similar since becoming an adult:
KGW's review did not locate any offensive tweets from Bell after he became an adult. In fact, by the latter half of 2015, Bell's public tweets were almost entirely about sports.
It would be nice to ask these questions of Haskins regarding his purported journalistic integrity and the supposed journalistic value of his story, but, as noted earlier, he took the cowardly way out by deleting his X account.
With any luck, Bell will land on his feet and score another NBA announcing job, assuming there is a team out there that doesn't bow down at the Altar of Woke.
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