Q:

mixing tenses in a sentence with "while"

The following is an excerpt from the Washington Post article, titled "When did the world turn against Justin Timberlake and embrace Britney Spears?":

They had a bad break-up three years later. While no one really knows what really happened, the tabloids had a pretty good idea. As Buzzfeed points out, magazines like Us Weekly were clearly Team Timberlake, intimating that Spears cheated on him. And Timberlake implied as much with a Spears doppelganger in his famous “Cry Me a River” video.
(source)

I am having trouble understanding why the author wrote: "knows" instead of "knew". On a paragraph level, the main tense is set in the past mood; on a sentence level, it is supposed to be "knew" because what the writer meant was that people did not know when the tabloids had a good idea. 
Later in the article, the writer wrote:

"In true Taylor Swiftian coy style, he’ll never confirm it’s about Spears. But everyone knows it’s Spears, and he’s referred to her in many interviews."

So there's no reasoning that the writer used "knows" because people still don't know.
I recently have been bothered by the mixing of tenses, especially on a sentence level. Can anyone please explain?

A:

While there means although.
Although no one can say all that really happened, the story told by tabloids was close to the truth.
The although-clause simply refers to the present state of knowledge.  There is no sense with while, as it is used here, that the lack of knowledge was concurrent with the story in the tabloids, that it existed during the same time frame.

