An award-winning ESPN producer resigned after 24 years over the network’s embrace of sports betting: “I’m not going to have blood on my hands.”
Idk if it’s a coincidence, but since F1 and MotoGP have been bought by Liberty Media, they started featuring prominent betting statistics before the start of the race.
It’s disgusting.
I’m not opposed to sports betting on its own, but I am absolutely appalled at how much it’s bastardized everything.
It’s one thing if it’s in small doses and you can sort of just ignore it. It’s another thing when EVERY FUCKING SITE AND PLATFORM has gambling odds, gambling ads, gambling sponsors. Etc. You can’t blink without these predators trying to siphon money from people.
If I were a recovering gambling addict and sports fan id be heartbroken right now.
It ain’t even just sport anymore. Election coverage on CNN includes Kalshi odds like it’s a fucking scientific study. Gambling is everywhere online too? Games, livestreams. Crypto casinos where they can get kids hooked.
Some of the initial friction between live streamers with the online left was when “gamba” became prevalent and they started calling it out.
It used to be illegal to have online poker like 25 years ago and now there are DraftKings banners in metro train stations and LeBron got $15mil annually to stump for Polymarket. What are we even doing?
The fucking prediction market odds during the news is insane, as if it has any bearing on reality.
It’s fucking back to the future 2…
Fucking it all up is the answer.
I’d love to buy Trump life insurance. Then I get reimbursed if he’s still in office, and it contributes towards a larger incentive.
Even more to it too. Once it gets big enough you start getting match fixing, so it ruins the sport and also endangers all players since fixing all but necessitates organized crime.
The final outcome is a world where someone bets on a runner up, and goes out to shoot the champion, to steal money from the addicted masses.The same issues apply for betting on other real world things.
Yeah I’m not some pearl-clutching puritan by any means, but all of this deeply embedded gambling (and “prediction market” bullshit) is not going to end well. The scandals, fixes, and chicanery will be off the charts and it’ll ruin sports.
Good for her. It’s incredibly difficult to walk away from a job like that and a job that she’s had for so long.
So it came as a shock to many people, including Nicole Noren, a longtime ESPN producer, when ESPN licensed its name to a gambling app in 2023. By then, ESPN, like so many sports outlets, was promoting betting at virtually every opportunity; now it would encourage fans to use ESPN Bet. The app, which stood to generate a billion and a half dollars for the network over ten years, proved to be an embarrassing flop. But it was promptly replaced by a partnership with DraftKings, the sports gambling giant. These days, DraftKings ads blanket ESPN coverage, and this past March the companies enabled customers to link their ESPN and DraftKings accounts. It’s a partnership, a press release explained, “that goes beyond a traditional marketing arrangement, redefining how fans engage with sports.”
For Noren, ESPN Bet was the last straw. “I was out,” she told me. “I’m not going to work for a gambling company and have blood on my hands.” ESPN wasn’t an easy place to leave. Noren had worked there for twenty-four years, winning Emmy, Murrow, and Peabody awards, mainly for her work on Outside the Lines, the investigative newsmagazine. She was entrusted with some of the network’s most serious and sensitive reporting, involving topics such as gender-based violence, the mental health of college students, and concussions. With the NFL back in full swing—and ESPN preparing to carry its first-ever Super Bowl, in February—Noren spoke publicly for the first time about her own family’s experience with compulsive gambling. “Addiction dictated every part of our life,” she said. “It’s very, very personal to me.” Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
We’re going to look at the normalization of gambling, especially online, as a huge mistake.
People have been gambling on competitions for as long as people have been hosting competitions
No, that’s how we’ll look at the drug war and normalizing throwing people in dungeons over drugs (and gambling).
A free society is a gambling and drug-using society. Your viewpoint is conservative, and an unfortunate side effect of our fundamentalist religious roots.
No, it is based on observation, history and understanding of human nature.
fuck you
it can be legal and not normalized, gambling is retarded and exploitative. there is no reason to have gambling ads anywhere, keep it in the casinos and regulate and tax the shit out of them.
you’re braindead
I am anti advertisement of gambling. I also think that drugs and alcohol should be legal, and the advertisement should not exist. The tax dollars should be spent on better schools and people who need help with addiction and cessation.
I don’t agree with her at all (I am pro sports betting and other betting), but I do admire her for standing up for what she believes in. Rare today
The world has embraced decadence. Things that were once considered distasteful or brutish have become mainstream.
UFC is one example. Sports betting another.
UFC and sports betting is not “decadent”.
They’re fundamentally human activities that people enjoy (as they always have for all time).
The Saudi Royal family is decadent, not betting 20 bucks on your favorite team.
lol I was ok with big pharma. I was ok with weapons manufacturers like Boeing. I was ok with tech perverts like Meta and Alphabet. I was ok with oil and gas companies. But I draw the line at … gambling?
She wasn’t working for those industries though…
