Portland Media Outlet Gets Trail Blazers Announcer Canceled Over Tweets From His Teen Years

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You know, I’ve seen some pretty pathetic stuff from the mainstream media over the decades I’ve been monitoring and reporting on them, but this next story really does take the cake.

Just a few days before the Portland Trail Blazers were set to play their first preseason game of the 2026-2027 season at home against the Golden State Warriors, the team announced they had hired a new TV play-by-play announcer, Braiden Bell.

Oregon Live also noted that “the Blazers had a ‘big pool’ of people show interest in the play-by-play job, including candidates with NBA experience and tenures working at ‘flagship sports news’ stations, a team source said. But they went with Bell because he’s ‘a rising talent.’”

After the news was widely reported, Bell received a lot of congrats from friends and fans, and the replies tab to his X page shows he was engaged with the Portland/NBA community and was incredibly excited to join an organization whose previous play-by-play announcer, Kevin Calabro, had been with them for over 20 years.

But literally, within hours of the announcement, Bell was abruptly fired, with a hastily crafted statement posted to the Trail Blazers’ social media pages explaining why. Before we get to that, though, let’s look at what prompted it.

Portland news station KGW filed a report revealing that one of their reporters, Devon Haskins, had done some digging into Bell’s past tweets and discovered a few “misogynistic and racist comments” Bell posted when he was 14 and 15 years old:

“I’m not racist at all.. But not gonna lie.. Asian people piss me off! Hahaha #Honest,” Bell wrote in a Dec. 9, 2012 tweet.

“Gotta give a shoutout to all the big girls out there and those closet w–res,” Bell wrote on Nov. 30, 2012.

“We got a sl-t alert on aisle 10,” he wrote on Feb. 13, 2013.

“Girls these nights… Smh. #ThirstyForTheD,” he wrote on Feb. 24, 2013.

The Trail Blazers, KGW also reported, fired Bell not long after they reached out to the sports organization for comment ahead of publishing the story. Here was the statement the team put out:

As you can see from the Community Note on the tweet, that “zero tolerance policy” is hot garbage when one takes a quick peek at the Trail Blazers’ history:

Amazingly, KGW news director John Tierney was incredibly proud of this “reporting,” and promoted it on his X page:

As one might imagine, it was only a matter of time before Devon Haskins’ X feed was combed, and now people are wondering if KGW will hold him to the same standard the Trail Blazers held Bell to:

Haskins, I should note, appears to have deleted his X account. But as they say, the internet is forever.

Something else to think about here is what was the journalistic value in this reporting? How did this serve the community? Is Bell running for public office? No. Is he a prominent public figure like a politician or someone in a position of power and influence whose background we need to know more about? No. So what was the rationale behind digging through a random, up-and-coming young NBA announcer’s old tweets? It just makes no sense.

For his part, Bell posted an apology to X, noting he was not the same person he was when he was a teenager:

Ironically, in the very story KGW published on this (almost at the end of it, of course), they noted, too, that he hadn’t posted anything questionable since he became 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.

Just disgraceful and completely unacceptable to put out this hit piece. There needs to be some real accountability for this at KGW if nowhere else than in the court of public opinion. There won’t be, but there should be.  And I hope that after Bell is (hopefully) able to move past this nightmare, he gets multiple job offers from which to choose.

– Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via X. –

 

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