Portland News Station That Got Broadcaster Fired Now Under Internal Investigation

This article was written by Matt Foley and published on Sport & State, a new media company founded by Clay Travis that is built around sports, culture, original voices, and live conversation.
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When news broke Friday of the Blazers firing Braiden Bell for tweets he made as a teenager, we immediately knew the situation stunk.

We weren’t the only ones.

Trail Blazers management may have thought that catering to the loud minority on the left would allow this story to fade away quickly. It appears that the opposite is true.

Several sources have told me TEGNA has launched an internal review into whether the editorial processes were followed at @KGWNews with respect to the station’s reporting on Braiden Bell, and that Devon Haskins and John Tierney were asked not to contribute to tonight’s follow-up. https://t.co/xkx5jlmbm2

— Matthew Keys (@MatthewKeysLive) October 3, 2026

TEGNA, the parent company of Portland NBC affiliate KGW-TV, has reportedly launched an internal review into the station’s reporting on the story. The review will examine whether KGW and journalists Devon Haskins and John Tierney followed TEGNA’s editorial processes while researching and reporting the story about Bell’s old social media posts.

Or, as it’s seemed to us all along, was this an ill-intentioned takedown from the jump?

ICYMI: Bell, 29, was announced Thursday as the new television play-by-play voice of the Trail Blazers. Hours later, he was unemployed.

Haskins discovered a few offensive tweets Bell posted in 2012 and 2013, when Bell was 15 years old, and KGW contacted the Blazers while preparing the story. Portland fired Bell several hours later.

In its own reporting, KGW acknowledged that it found no offensive posts from Bell after he became an adult. As we argued on Friday, that’s more important than the initial teenage idiocy.

Bell apologized Friday afternoon, and Haskins went into internet hiding after a stupid tweet of his own — from when he was an adult (GASP!) — was uncovered by Twitter sleuths. Neither Haskins nor KGW responded to Sport & State when asked to comment on the hypocrisy

The cowardly Portland reporter who “exposed” tweets sent when a newly hired NBA play by play announcer was 15 years old has now deleted his Twitter account shortly after I tweeted this at him below. The opening of your newscast tonight @KGWNews should be a public apology.

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) October 2, 2026

KGW’s Tierney also had some questionable content unearthed.

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.

(At the time, he worked as a news producer for KATU, the ABC affiliate in Portland.) https://t.co/ccNFpJ1C6i

— Matthew Keys (@MatthewKeysLive) October 3, 2026

Clearly, damage control is underway.

The issue isn’t whether all of these stupid jokes warrant punishment. It’s whether any of them do, particularly posts made by a boy who is still learning and growing into a more mature version of himself.

Every time a story about uncovering someone’s old internet posts hits the airwaves, it’s almost always in bad faith, and that seems to be true for KGW’s process of researching and reporting this story.

No one deserves to see their career destroyed for something so harmless. But the news professionals behind such an irresponsible excuse for journalism definitely deserve to pay for what they started.

We’ll see what comes of it.