Linda Cohn on Blazers broadcaster saga: ‘How long should a person have to pay?’

The Trail Blazers’ decision to fire newly hired play-by-play broadcaster Braiden Bell isn’t fading quietly into the background.

Now longtime former ESPN SportsCenter anchor Linda Cohn has weighed in, questioning whether comments made by someone at 15 years old should follow that person indefinitely.

Bell lost the Blazers job just hours after KGW-TV reported on racist and sexist social-media posts he made as a teenager. Bell, now 29, later apologized for the posts and said they do not reflect who he is today.

Cohn, speaking on The Linda Cohn Show, didn’t excuse what Bell wrote. Her issue was what happens after someone acknowledges youthful mistakes and grows beyond them.

“If there is no path back from something you said at 15, then we’re not really asking people to learn from their mistakes, are we?” Cohn said. “We’re just waiting to find those mistakes.”

That’s pretty much the question hanging over this entire story.

“The stupid thing a teenager posts tonight can still be sitting there when they’re 29 years of age, applying for their dream job,” Cohn said. “Braiden Bell learned that in probably the most painful way imaginable. He got his dream job and hours later, it was gone like that.”

Cohn stressed that Bell’s original comments were indefensible.

“The words he wrote at 15 were wrong,” she said. “There’s no defending them. But I think we’re allowed to ask another question, too. How long should a person have to pay for the worst thing they said as a kid? Fourteen years? Twenty? Forever?”

The story has since grown well beyond Bell. TEGNA, KGW’s parent company, has reportedly launched an internal review into whether proper editorial procedures were followed in the station’s reporting, while KGW itself has faced significant public criticism. Cohn’s larger point may explain why this one has struck such a nerve.

“If we don’t believe people can become better than who they were at 15,” she said, “then I think we’ve got a much bigger problem than one NBA broadcaster’s old Twitter account.”