Episode 206: How the Gambling Industry Swallowed Sports Media Whole
Citations Needed | July 31, 2024 | Transcript
[Music]
Intro: This is Citations Needed with Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson.
Nima Shirazi: Welcome to Citations Needed, a podcast on the media, power, PR, and the history of bullshit. I’m Nima Shirazi.
Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.
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Adam: Yeah. So as always, if you do listen to the show and you like it and you haven’t, please, please sign up for Patreon. Doing so helps keep the episodes themselves free and the show sustainable and does prevent us from doing ads and promo codes. So, if you don’t donate, if you don’t subscribe to Patreon, we will have to humiliate ourselves, start giving out ridiculous parlay bets.
Nima: “Legalize and Regulate Sports Betting,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver wrote for the New York Times in 2014. “NFL Betting Promos & Bonuses | Top NFL Betting Sites & Offers for Week 9 NFL Odds & More,” USA Today offered readers in 2023. “Bookmakers break down NBA, NHL playoffs, big bets,” reads a June 2024 Fox Sports headline.
Adam: Since the legalization of sports gambling in 2018 by the Supreme Court, sports betting and other forms of sports gambling have all but taken over American sports media. Increasingly, over the last six years, leading sources on sports news including ESPN, Fox Sports, CBS, and NBC, have signed multi-million and sometimes multi-billion dollar agreements with major players in the sports betting industry, launching suites of gambling themed verticals, podcasts and series designed to urge viewers and listeners to keep placing their bets no matter the social cost.
Nima: These media platforms claim to reason that amid a shifting media landscape where cable channels struggle to adapt to the streaming era and legacy newspapers hemorrhage advertising revenue, partnerships with sports gambling companies can help keep them afloat. But what does it mean when sports media are beholden to betting companies? Given the predatory nature of the industry and the clear conflict of interest, what are the social and political costs of shifting sports from an admittedly already very flawed entertainment business to a widespread peddler of increasingly unsustainable and gimmicky gambling opportunities?
Adam: On today’s episode, we’ll examine how sports media in the US has increasingly embedded itself in the exploding online sports betting industry, looking at the corrosive effect this has on sports coverage and what we used to call sports journalism, the glaring conflict of interest in all this, and the moral hazards of a media climate and state and local governments welcoming with open arms what is effectively a regressive tax pushed by a notoriously rapacious and exploitative industry.
Nima: Later on the show, we’ll speak with Dave Zirin (@edgeofsports), sports editor at The Nation magazine, host of the Edge of Sports podcast and its spinoff The Butterfly Effect, as well as Edge of Sports TV, which airs on The Real News Network. Dave is the author of 11 books on the politics of sports, including What’s My Name, Fool?, Brazil’s Dance With The Devil, Welcome to the Terrordome, A People’s History of Sports in the United States, and Jim Brown: Last Man Standing. His most recent is The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World, published by The New Press in 2022.
[Begin clip]
Dave Zirin: As a fan, there’s an undercurrent of ugliness. If anybody’s ever been to Vegas and had a negative experience, then that’s what it feels like sometimes when you’re at these games and they’re bombarding you with sportsbook stuff. Everybody looks a little bit more desperate than they should. Everybody looks a little more angry than they should. And I really don’t think I’m projecting this because it’s flashing at us constantly. I mean, how could it not affect the fan experience?
[End clip]
Adam: I am legally required, as you all know, to say this is a spiritual successor.
Nima: That’s right, especially in Nevada and New Jersey.
Adam: That’s true. Episode 63 from 2019 called “Gambling and Neoliberal Rot — How Our Most Regressive Tax Flies Under the Radar” where we discussed the inherently regressive and predatory nature of using gambling to fill “budget gaps” at the state level, how it’s a way of avoiding taxing the rich and instead coming up with what is more or less and remains to this day, a tax on the poor, disproportionately in the middle class. Now, that episode, in retrospect, is quite quaint. That episode is now five years old. This was before online gambling was allowed at the state level.
Nima: That’s right. We were ragging on lotteries, but we didn’t know shit.
Adam: Yeah, we were. And then I made a joke about, why not just put slot machines in public housing lobbies? Turns out it’s actually way worse than that. They’re putting it on everyone’s phones. So, because we are the scoldiest, least fun show in the world, and our job is to tsk tsk and ruin everything, we plan on doing that for this show. Again, the issue is not whether or not sports gambling should be legal as such. It’s more about whether or not it ought to have completely captured sports media and whether or not it should be shoved down people’s throats. The analogy that Hamilton Nolan from In These Times uses, he says, “It is just as dystopian as, say, legalizing heroin and turning the entire industry over to the world’s biggest tobacco companies with no regulation on advertising or free samples, and lending them the world’s most powerful supercomputers to design their marketing strategy.”
And that’s kind of our position here because I think we should be transparent about our position, which is not one of carceralism or even necessarily making anything illegal, but it does seem like there’s an increasingly libertarian attitude, even among some supposed socialists, liberals, progressives where anything-goes regulation is seen as a kind of Baptist nanny-state thing, and we argue in this episode, especially given its intersection with media in terms of taking over the sports verticals of Disney and Fox and News Corp.
Nima: And that you can’t watch any kind of sport without having the play-by-play announcers and the color commentators call out what the odds are or what prop bets to make.
Adam: So, we’re excited to sort of dig into some of the pitfalls of what it means to have an entirely libertarian, let-it-run-wild sports gaming industry entirely co-op sports media. And what the implications of that are, what the implications are to the extent to which there is pushback, it is, of course, occupied by Baptist conservative skulls, and whether or not there is a space for a left-wing pushback against what appears to be the inevitable, which is the gamification and sportsbook-ification of every aspect of our lives as another way of creating money out of nothing, right? The industry itself does not create a cure for cancer or a longer lasting light bulb or a faster train or provide any kind of entertainment value outside of the most base kind. So the question is, what is the actual value being created? And of course, what are the social and political costs of that value such as it is?
Nima: So, let’s get into this. And as we love our history here on Citations Needed, let’s do a little history of gambling, which itself has always been intertwined with the history of sport. Since the invention of sports of skill and games of chance, people have been betting on the outcomes. As far back as 4000 BC, Ancient Egyptians were betting on dice, board games, chariot racing, and fencing. In eighth-century BC Greece, the Olympic Games were gambled on just as wealthy Romans later wagered on animal fights, chariot racing, and gladiatorial combat. Though gambling was periodically outlawed in ancient Rome, there were exceptions made for holidays.
The Roman Empire then spread gambling across Europe. One of the first official regulations put in place on gambling occurred in England in 1190 when King Richard I, also known as Richard the Lionheart, decreed who could gamble and how much they were allowed to bet. While no one ranked lower than a knight was permitted to make wagers, noblemen and clergy could but would only be allowed to bet up to 20 shillings per day. Anyone who gambled more than that was subject to a 100 shilling fine. Well, except for King Richard himself, of course, who could do whatever the fuck he wanted.
Dice games grew in popularity during the reign of Richard II as well. Geoffrey Chaucer mentions dice betting in the Canterbury Tales, for example. In 1397, the king ruled that gambling could only take place on non-work days, and as card games became more popular across Britain in the 15th century, Edward IV’s Parliament banned the importation of playing cards, tennis balls, and dice from abroad in the early 1460s and also made it illegal for anyone outside of the aristocracy to play card or dice games except during the Christmas holiday. According to author Susan Higginbotham, a Parliament roll from November 1461 reads like this: “No lord or other person of lower estate, condition or degree, whatever he may be, shall allow any dicing or playing at cards within his house, or wherever else he may prevent it, by any of his servants or others outside the twelve days of Christmas.” Henry VIII enacted the Unlawful Games Act of 1541, prohibiting all games from being played on Christmas Day, therefore effectively making gambling illegal. He did this to prevent the “decay of archery” since the common folk, of course, needed to keep up their military training in case of invasion.
By the 16th and 17th centuries, Europeans were also betting on cockfights, wrestling, and foot races. Eventually, popular spectator sports like horse racing and boxing turned gambling into a business for the middle and wealthy classes. Indeed, anything really could be wagered on.
Adam: In the late 18th century, the Brooks’s club in London, which was founded in 1764 and still exists to this day, is still a private club of the British elite. During the reign of George III, it became an infamous den of sin for British elites, nobility, aristocrats, etc. According to Andrew Roberts’s 2021 book, The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III, Brooks’s was a place where you could pretty much wager on anything. Roberts would write, and the book is total Tory propaganda, but it does have a lot of funny anecdotes like this.
He wrote King George III “disliked Brooks’s, believing it — quite correctly — to be a den of aristocratic drunkenness, high-stakes gambling and radical ideas. Its betting book provides a valuable insight into the thinking of the Whig party since the Club’s founding in 1764, although the members wagered on many things beyond politics, such as who would be the next bishop of Durham; whether the beautiful Anna-Frederica Heinel would dance at the Opera House the next winter; 3rd Duke of Queensberry would die before 5.30 p.m. on 27 June 1773; whether Lord Northington would get married before Lord Cholmondeley or the Duke of Devonshire; whether Charles Fox would clear his debts; who would become the Prince of Wales’ governor; when there would be another war with France; whether any minister would be beheaded; whether the Perreau brothers would be hanged for forgery; the future size of the National Debt; the average weight of sheep sold at Smithfield Market; whether ‘a ball fired from a cannon pointed horizontally does not rise before it falls (to be decided by a demonstration)’; the outcomes of courts martial, horse races and by-elections, and whether Captain John Donnellan had con- fessed to the murder of Sir Theodosius Broughton before he was hanged. Charles Fox and Mr Hanger even bet on which of them would get gout first, though sadly history does not record who won.”
Sports betting at the time was generally limited to picking a winner. By the early 1790s, a British person by the name of Harry Ogden became the world’s first bookie to establish odds on each horse running at the Newmarket races. Gambling was brought across the Atlantic to the British colonies, of course. British settlers brought their passion for horse racing with them to the so-called New World, and the first racetrack was established in 1665 on what is now known as Long Island, New York. New Orleans was the first sports betting and gambling center. Although, in 1813, Louisiana authorities banned casinos across the whole state. New Orleans was the only city allowed to continue operations.
Nima: While most forms of gambling, including sports gambling, became illegal across the United States during the more moralistic times of the 19th century, it remained legal to bet on horse racing. Sports gambling scandals such as the 1919 Black Sox scandal routinely made headlines. The state of Nevada legalized gambling in 1931 during the Great Depression and throughout the 1960s, Nevada’s gambling industry expanded. By 1971, Congress lowered the sports betting tax to 2%. This was a boon for legal sports betting in the state. And in 1975, Nevada State Legislature further reduced the tax on sports bets. In 1991, there was a huge change. The Internet became publicly accessible, and the first online sportsbook emerged, pioneered by the German company Intertops.
Adam: So, now we’re in the digital era. Before 2018, betting on professional sports was illegal in most US states, excluding a handful of states like Nevada and New Jersey. This was the result of the 1992 1992 Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA), which effectively outlawed sports gambling in most states. At the time of the law’s passage, the prevailing attitude in professional sports was against sports betting. Prior to the enactment of PASPA, the commissioners of multiple pro sports leagues including David Stern of the NBA, Paul Tagliabue of the NFL, and Fay Vincent of the MLB appeared before a Senate panel to urge Congress to pass it. And several years later, in 1989, Pete Rose was banned from Major League Baseball for placing bets on the Cincinnati Reds while playing for and managing the team although he claimed he never bet against them.
The enactment of PASPA elicited some pushback. In 2009, for example, the state of New Jersey, home of Atlantic City, filed a federal lawsuit against PASPA, saying that it violated the 10th Amendment, which allows states to make decisions about “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States.” And in November of 2014, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver wrote an op-ed in the New York Times, headlined “Legalize and Regulate Sports Betting.” The op-ed was one of the first indications that there was a sea change in professional sports’ relationship with gambling. Silver argued that quote “Times have changed since Paspa was enacted,” and proposed a number of questionable guardrails including “geo-blocking technology to ensure betting is available only where it is legal; mechanisms to identify and exclude people with gambling problems; and education about responsible gaming.” Yes, more PSAs.
Back to the New Jersey lawsuit, the Supreme Court heard the case by then, known as Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, also known as the NCAA. The court ruled in May of. 2018 that PASPA was unconstitutional, allowing states where sports betting had been illegal to legalize it. This had a major impact. Sports betting is now legal in 38 states, including Washington, DC.
Nima: The overturning of PASPA really did set the stage for what we now see across media, primarily sports media outlets like ESPN: the widespread embrace and integration of gambling platforms, both for corporate sponsorships and in programming and reporting itself. The primary reason for this is that the partnerships with gambling companies are a major source of these sports outlets revenue. We noted in a previous episode of Citations Needed, Episode 160 which was on cryptocurrency, NFTs, and other forms of gambling that The Ringer, Bill Simmons’s podcast network and content platform, signed a deal in early 2021 with FanDuel, making FanDuel its exclusive sports betting partner. FanDuel, of course, is a leading sportsbook company. As of June 2021, Bloomberg reported, FanDuel had a 42% share of US sports wagers. The Associated Press also struck a deal with FanDuel in 2021 in which FanDuel paid the AP to include its sports odds in its sports coverage.
Gannett, the parent company of USA Today and the largest newspaper chain in the United States, signed a deal with sports betting company Tipico in 2021 as well. It was a big year for sportsbooks. According to Reuters, “Gannett will embed either a button or an icon for Tipico in its sport content and receive a referral fee for traffic that leads to first-time bettors on Tipico’s platform. Tipico will also spend $90 million on Gannett advertising and sponsored content, including videos, columns, blog posts and events.”
Gannett also struck an affiliate deal in 2023 with Gambling.com. As part of the deal, Gambling.com creates reviews of “top-betting sites” and betting promos with links to sportsbooks that are published on Gannett sites like USA Today and Gannett takes a cut, of course, of any bets made through the links that it publishes. USA Today includes bylines on this so-called content as well as disclaimers such as the following: “We may earn a fee if you make a purchase through one of the links in this article. The USA Today Network newsroom and editorial staff were not involved in the creation of this content.”
Now, few sports media outlets have cashed in on sports betting recently like ESPN has. The network had included sports betting segments on its series Sports Center for years but debuted its initial sports betting-themed show, Daily Wager in March 2019 soon after online sports gambling was legalized across the country. By 2022, ESPN had announced at least half a dozen new podcasts, shows, segments, and columns centered around sports betting as well as new sports betting-themed additions to its fixture shows like SportsCenter. And it hired or promoted at least eight sports betting analysts. In August 2023, ESPN launched ESPN BET, its online sportsbook, as part of a 10-year, $2 billion deal with the casino company Penn Entertainment with the apparent reasoning that the additional revenue would keep the network afloat in the streaming era. Penn had previously purchased the sports media company, Barstool Sports, which it sold before the deal with ESPN. Axios reported that ESPN BET had captured 8% of the gambling market by November of 2023. Prior to that deal, though, ESPN had already signed agreements with Caesars Entertainment and DraftKings, other sportsbooks.
Adam: Here’s a March 2024 clip from a segment on ESPN College GameDay featuring sports betting analyst Erin Dolan and ESPN commentator Rece Davis, following an ESPN bet segment hosted by Dolan. Davis effectively normalizes the trend of runaway sports betting by calling it “risk-free.” Listen to the clip now.
[Begin clip]
Erin Dolan: And we see, we like to go off what we just saw. So, for Northwestern, for example, they just put up 77 points on Florida Atlantic. But remember 19 of those points, they came in overtime. So, I expect this to be a slow game all around, good defenses on both sides of the ball. And so, if you look at a team total, although it seems low at 60 and a half, I’m going to go under there.
Rece Davis: You know what? Some would call this wagering, gambling. I think the way you sold this, I think what it is risk-free investment. That’s the way to look at it.
Erin Dolan: Positive way.
[End clip]
Adam: Alright, so obviously that’s ill-advised, even by the normal standards of pushing gambling on people. Rece Davis, after taking some backlash, claimed he was joking, saying on Twitter:
During a segment this morning on @CollegeGameDay, due to @ESPNBet picks hitting yesterday, I joked the advice was more like ‘risk free investing.’ As we all know, such a thing does not exist. Obviously, there are risks. Though I’m not a gambler, I strongly encourage those who do partake, do so with prudence, care, caution, fiscal and personal responsibility and never over-extend. Sports are unpredictable. Wagering is tricky. So let’s agree to manage monetary risks appropriately. I’m sure most recognized my comment was tongue-in-cheek. Just to clarify.
I’m sure the ESPN lawyers —
Nima: [Laughing] The lawyers and communications team were working all night.
Adam: Look, they’re not stupid. Everybody knows there are dozens of plaintiffs lawyers around the clock working on a major lawsuit about this, right? I mean, that’s why there’s been some reforms. A lot of them have come from the industry itself that knows it’s highly, highly vulnerable to class action lawsuits, and ESPN telling people that it’s a risk-free investment will be put up on some poster at a courtroom at some point in the next few years. But of course, ESPN has very, very little critical approach to gambling. ESPN is the biggest sports media, ostensibly the biggest sports journalism outlet, and does virtually no critical coverage of sports gambling, because its primary growth vertical right now is sports gambling.
Nima: Gambling has long been a way — at least put by legislators and elected officials — to “cover budget shortfalls” locally. We’ve discussed this more as a regressive tax, namely in our 2019 episode on “Gambling and Neoliberal Rot — How Our Most Regressive Tax Flies Under the Radar.” So, robust research on gambling and state lotteries also as really predatory and regressive taxes on poor people are hard to come by, but we can refer to a number of older studies. For instance, one 2009 study by the Hartford Courant showed that the highest concentration of Connecticut lottery players was in its poorest cities: New Haven, Hartford, and Bridgeport. And according to a 2008 study by the Illinois Church Action on Alcohol and Addiction Problems (ILCAAAP), a coalition of black churches, of the six neighborhoods studied on the west side of Chicago in 2008, the two with the highest unemployment — Bellwood and Maywood — also generated the highest per capita sales of lottery tickets. And a 1994 study from Indiana University found that from 1983 through 1991, lottery sales tended to rise along with unemployment rates.
Adam: As Hamilton Nolan noted in February of 2022 for In These Times:
States like to think of the tax revenue they bring in from legal gambling as free money from heaven, but it amounts to a regressive tax on citizens, aimed most intensely at those who are so desperate for financial salvation that the vanishing hope provided by the idea of hitting the lottery is worth the certainty that you will, in fact, not hit the lottery. If state governments want more money, they should tax the people who have the ability to pay: the rich. They should not gamify a tax on the poor and pretend that it is not a tax. Gambling is a tax on gamblers, and another name for gamblers is ’citizens.’…
Legal gambling, then, is the perfect right-wing grift: The rich get richer, the regular suckers get poorer, the money is funneled upwards, and public services are forced to obtain their funding by ripping off the public they are supposed to serve.
So, let’s establish the stakes of the media’s integration into this gambling industry, again, which is something that constantly needs to grow like any other industry. It has to find new verticals and new markets. It has to sort of expand, right? One, of course, does not want to be puritanical or paternalistic. We’re obviously not John Lithgow from Footloose. We’re not here to tsk tsk people for moral failings. But the question is whether or not one wants to organize both journalism and tax revenue based on something that exploits typically, the vulnerable, the poor, the credulous.
There are documented health problems posed by sports gambling legalization in the US to the extent we do have research on it. First, people lose a lot of money. In 2023, Americans legally wagered $120 billion on sports, an increase of 27% from 2022. A 2024 survey from St. Bonaventure University, which you only know because you bet on March Madness, found the following:
Fifteen percent of all Americans including 22% of young men (18–49) and 30% of ‘avid’ fans know someone who has or had a problem with online sports betting. Of those who place bets with an online sportsbook, 37% have felt bad or ashamed after losing a bet, 38% have felt that they bet more than they should have, 19% have lied to someone about the extent of their betting, and 18% have bet and lost money that was meant for meeting their financial obligations. By 65–23%, Americans agree that online sports betting will end up creating compulsive gamblers that will cause pain to them and their families.
Nima: And like all forms of gambling, problem sports betting can be extremely corrosive to mental health. As the University of British Columbia has noted:
Subjects that met several of the nine Gambling Disorder criteria indicated that they experienced cravings, withdrawal symptoms, and physical symptoms such as accelerated heartbeat, nausea, and sweaty palms. Reports also indicate that subjects develop a betting tolerance due to the over-stimulation of neurotransmitter systems resulting in subjects placing high-risk and high-stake wagers to activate said systems.
According to a 2018 survey, two-thirds of gamblers observed that their mental health suffered due to their gambling behavior. Furthermore, individuals diagnosed with Gambling Addiction’s more severe form, namely Gambling Disorder, frequently experienced comorbidity along with their diagnosis.
Additionally, many of the bare minimum targets of regulation are allowed to run rampant, like advertising and betting on individual players. Sportsbooks, as we well know, are allowed to advertise during sporting events themselves and use AI to track gambling habits. Some Congress members have introduced legislation to counter this such as the SAFE Bet Act, but serious regulation has yet to materialize.
Adam: The SAFE Bet Act attempts to ban sports advertising during live events, ban language from sportsbook advertising, promoting bonus or no sweat bets or free bets, prohibit sportsbooks from accepting credit cards from consumers seeking to make deposits, requiring sportsbooks to accept no more than five deposits from a single consumer within a 24-hour period although it seems pretty reasonable, prohibit gambling operations from using AI to track players gambling habits and to use AI to create consumer specific prompt bets.
But that, of course, went nowhere because the gambling industry spends a boatload of money on lobbying. So again, we find ourselves in a little pickle where it’s like, where is that balance between not having the FBI raid your Thursday night poker game or shutting down Las Vegas? And then the other end of the spectrum is, do we have this kind of libertarian free for all where we allow, again, similar to kind of a 1950s tobacco company model, where we say, okay, well maybe, maybe this industry is kind of inherently predatory and evil, and perhaps it needs to be heavily regulated, and any suggestion to that effect is somehow being a buzzkill, especially when it interfaces with the total co-option of media that’s supposed to be the same media that reports on and exposes the wrongdoing from this industry, but they themselves are so in bed with the industry that there’s almost no critical reporting. So, there’s an institutional conflict of interest when the media itself becomes a gambling peddler.
Nima: To discuss the effect that this rise in sportsbooks has on sports media and athletics in general, we’re now going to be joined by Dave Zirin (@edgeofsports), sports editor at The Nation magazine, host of the Edge of Sports podcast and its spinoff The Butterfly Effect, as well as Edge of Sports TV, which airs on The Real News Network. Dave is the author of 11 books on the politics of sports, including What’s My Name, Fool?, Brazil’s Dance With The Devil, Welcome to the Terrordome, A People’s History of Sports in the United States, and Jim Brown: Last Man Standing. His most recent is The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World, published by The New Press in 2022.
[Music]
Nima: We are joined now by long-time friend of the show, Dave Zirin. Welcome back, Dave, to Citations Needed.
Dave Zirin: It is great to be here. This is one of the few pods that I do where when I’m in other cities, people come up to me and they’re fans of the show, and they go out of their way to want to talk to me about the pod as if I know anything about it other than coming on and being a more than an occasional listener, but they want the inside dope on Adam and Nima. It’s kind of awesome, actually.
Nima: Oh, well, that’s very kind. Feel free to make up whatever you want.
Adam: Yes, we appreciate that a lot, and we’re very grateful for you making time to come on to talk about a subject which is not very sexy, but one we kind of wanted to cover because it’s so ubiquitous and so obvious but very much under covered. And it really takes someone who is kind of sequestered away at The Nation and Real News like yourself, I think, give it its kind of due time. And I know there are other authors around the sort of periphery of sports media and other journalists who have done good reporting on this, but it is not very common. So, I want to talk about what you call “online gambling, swallowing professional sports.” Seems like in a matter of about five years, the sports media world now does sports entertainment and sports journalism second and first and foremost their job is to kind of push people into opening up their wallets and giving their credit card numbers so they can wager on whatever sporting event is coming up that day.
And in many ways, the media companies aren’t just partnering with sportsbooks. They are themselves becoming sportsbooks or at least lending their brand to sportsbooks. And they fully integrated into the broadcast coverage. There are reports that they’re going to do so even more next year with a live betting element of NBA games and football. So, I want to sort of talk about this pivot. As someone who’s covered sports, not to date you, but for as long as you have, I want to sort of talk about, and of course, this dovetails with the sort of death of sports journalism at places like ESPN, which used to have some pretense that they did sports journalism, and that’s kind of slowly eroded to nothing. Can you give our listeners a little bit of background about how the sports world is completely consumed by turning players into roulette balls and roulette chips, and what you think the impact on that has been for sports media, more generally, just to kind of orient our audience?
Dave Zirin: Well, it’s been head-spinning. First and foremost, in 2017, there was one state with legalized sports gambling. It was Nevada. Now, there are 38 and this has been an explosion that’s taken place since the Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that you could open up sportsbooks anywhere across the country that the state legislature approved. So, you have these 12 holdouts. But you know, gambling is effectively now everywhere. Sports gambling in the United States. And I’ll tell you, from my perspective, I didn’t see this coming. I feel like this has hit me in the sports world like a freight train over the last few years where a lot of us, you know, it’s like whiplash, and we’re just saying what the hell just happened? Like, this massive, organic economic ricochet has taken place into the sports world and smashed it, and now it’s reforming is something else. When it happened in 2018, I remember my head was all in what looked like a generational explosion of politics and sports, particularly through the Black Lives Matter movement. Colin Kaepernick had taken a knee in 2016, it spread to high schools around the country and colleges as well, elementary schools. And that’s where my head was.
And when the Supreme Court decision came down, I remember thinking like, oh, okay, you know, generally, I’m not for things being criminalized or put in the dark corners. And so, you know, my basic, left half libertarian mindset of just like, oh, gambling should be legal just like these other “vices” that the Vice Squad used to go after, bringing it into the sunlight and all that stuff. What I did not foresee was that gambling would be so thoroughly embraced, not only by the leagues but also the journalists themselves as part of what a lot of people call, the sports or athletic industrial complex. We did not see that gambling would become a tent pole along with cable television deals. And so, when you look at things like exploding salaries and the NBA, I mean, that comes from exploding revenue, and that revenue is a cut from places like DraftKings, FanDuel, and all the rest of it. I mean, this just says something about my techno idiocy, but I didn’t foresee the rise of the apps. Like, oh, gambling legal. I thought that meant, you know, alright, people can go down to their local sportsbook.
Nima: Or go to the OTB.
Dave Zirin: Go to the OTB, yeah, my head was [laughs] 1987. Hey, it’s marvelous Marv Throneberry at the OTB. That was the old New York commercial.
Adam: Yeah, because the general idea, which we talked about at the top of the show is that there’s this kind of binary libertarian logic that I think is actually antithetical to liberal left orientation around sort of rapacious corporations, right? And I think that people say, oh, it’s legal, just whatever. But obviously, we don’t do that for tobacco. We don’t do that for guns. These things are heavily regulated because there’s a sort of general understanding that corporations, especially corporations that are entirely parasitic, that have no value, right? So DraftKings doesn’t create a longer-lasting light bulb or cure cancer or provide any kind of genuine entertainment. It is purely degenerative. And they’ll tell you that, right? That this is something that ought to have the brakes put on it or be regulated in some way without necessarily, like you said, empowering law enforcement or anything that’s sort of antithetical to leftist worldviews. And then there was this idea of like, well, it’s illegal, just whatever. Who cares? And it’s like, well, wait a second. Do we really need the University of Michigan partnering with the sportsbook marketing to college kids? Is that really maybe the best use of our society?
And so, it offends, you know, I think it offends people as sports fans. Do I really need Bob Costas telling me the over-under on how many strikeouts Blake Snell is going to get versus it offends you as a leftist because clearly, it is evidence of, as we argued when we did an episode on legalized gambling — God, six years ago which, again, is positively quaint in retrospect — it is symptomatic of a kind of broader neoliberal collapse. It is not creating anything. It is purely about getting money from people’s wallets and funneling it into three counties, and, you know, Connecticut, Virginia, and New York. And it’s also like any other form of gambling. It is, at the end of the day, whether we like it or not, is a regressive tax. And so, I want you to talk about how you sort of view that.
Nima: Made all the easier through app betting, right? I mean, at your fingertips.
Dave Zirin: Exactly, it’s the putting of casinos in people’s pockets that have been the big game changer.
Adam: Yeah, but there’s no barrier to entry.
Dave Zirin: Right. And you know, my kid is 16 at his high school, you know, a ton of kids have their parents’ passwords. They’re getting bets placed. And my son, he’s like, hey, Dad, we got a generation of bookies here at the school that are coming out. There’s that aspect. And then with that, you know, kids stealing apps and the apps having such easy access to gambling. You have this from the data, we have an incredible rise in youth gambling addiction, people 25 and under seeking treatment. The states that have released this information and not all of them have talked about their gambling hotlines. Just blowing up full tilt in the last several years. There are real issues here, scientific issues about, you know, how gambling affects the frontal lobe of the brain when it’s not fully developed, addiction when you’re 16, and how that affects you versus when you’re 36 that’s being completely exploited. This isn’t being exploited by somebody in the back of a dark pool hall. This is being exploited by the people that are held up to us as these great leaders like the Roger Goodells of the world, the Adam Silvers. You know, people who are turned to for commentary when Henry Kissinger dies.
Adam: Disney, CBS, I mean, media corporations, which, yeah, which we’ll get into.
Dave Zirin: No, absolutely. I just mean, the way the sports leagues have used their own sort of grandeur in history to say that this somehow isn’t gross and parasitic. And one little stat, because I was telling Nima about this guy named Danny Funt, he’s writing a whole book about this next year that I’m hoping is going to at least expand the discussion just a little bit. He estimates that, you know, we’ve gone from less than 1% of the population, and call it 2017, having what we would call it as a sports addiction problem. Less than 1%. And he puts it now at 4% based on the data that he’s gotten. That’s an insane number.
Nima: It’s a lot of people.
Dave Zirin: If you’re talking about actual people who have come forward in trying to get help with addiction, specifically around sports.
Nima: Yeah, it’s, it’s become, like the national sports vape.
Dave Zirin: Yes.
Nima: You know, you had mentioned the media’s complicity in this and as a media-focused show, from a kind of media criticism perspective, there’s a fairly glaring institutional conflict of interest operating here. Obviously, if gambling is the biggest revenue source for outlets like ESPN, Fox, NBC Sports, all of which have billions of dollars invested in gambling. These same outlets that are supposed to cover sports are not only not going to then criticize gambling, right? They are going to constantly promote it. They become the boosters along with the kind of grandeur of athletics and the superstars, but they’re also simultaneously boosting the betting on those, the betting on the moments and the kind of majesty of it, and this, as we discussed at the top of the show, is very, very obvious when doing a survey of the coverage in sports media, which almost never critically discusses gambling in any meaningful way. Sometimes, there’s, like, bad apple stuff. I mean, you know, you can kind of Pete Rose stuff all the while, but nothing systemic, nothing institutional is ever said to need to be reined in. Now you, of course, are an exception here, Dave, as pure as the driven snow. But how do you perceive this often unspoken code of silence in the non-Dave Zirin sports journalism world when it comes to sports gambling? Is there any sense that this is an issue that can be kind of critiqued from inside the house in any meaningful way?
Dave Zirin: Well, no, and we’ve seen it because we’ve had this cascading number of scandals in recent months. Bench player for the Toronto Raptors named Jontay Porter. A player for the San Diego Padres by the name of Marcano. You’ve had everything around Shohei Ohtani. And was it Shohei or was it his translator who was able to embezzle $4 million in Shohei’s name? Let’s put this story away very quickly.
Adam: I mean, it’s probably his translator.
(Lee Jin-man / Associated Press)
Dave Zirin: Yeah, probably.
Adam: Well, only because the Department of Justice, I feel like for them to be in on it would be pretty extraordinary.
Dave Zirin: That would be extraordinary.
Adam: Plus, if you look at the guy, how much he sweats when he talks about it, he kind of looks like a degenerate gambler.
Dave Zirin: I don’t know, but on the other side, you know, Shohei Ohtani is our Mark McGwire. And, you know, do we really want to know the horrible truth?
Adam: I don’t.
Dave Zirin: Or do we want to see Shohei hit some more dingers?
Nima: That’s right, the highest paid in all the land.
Adam: He’s definitely too big to fail.
Dave Zirin: No, indeed. But with these stories comes this idea of, there’s going to have to be a reckoning at some point with this. I mean, we have a situation right now, if you described it where journalists are giving odds. You know, these journalists who are lauded with Emmys and awards and, you know, speaking engagements and professorships are now telling you what the parlay is on Klay Thompson’s and Steph’s number of threes they’re going to hit in a game. So, when it’s done, I think it’s been toxic throughout the whole industry. I mean, I don’t think I want to definitely put names to names, but I think some of these folks, we all know who they are, are the people who are the faces of these institutions and faces of the idea that they also represent something resembling journalism, and they’re not critiquing what I think is eventually going to be the biggest story in all the land, which is how gambling has the potential to hollow out sports.
Adam: So, let’s talk about this. Because I think some people listening may say, oh, you guys are just being —
Dave Zirin: Spoil sports.
Nima: Or even, like, puritanical in a weird way.
Adam: Right, because, again, traditionally been the sort of domain of the Baptist. And I want to sort of talk about because it is a question of, sort of where that line is. And I think that’s something we’ve talked about. And it seems like people have presented it as a binary, either it’s completely libertarian laissez-faire with some protections for minors, although as you mentioned, those protections are pretty trivial. And anyone who’s talked to anyone who works in the gambling regulation state offices, it’s like, two guys. It’s basically impossible to regulate, and by design, because, again, gambling company lobbyists just pour money into state legislators when these laws get passed, I mean, just an ungodly amount of money.
And so, where is that line? And some people have argued that the toothpaste is out of the bottle. You can’t really make it illegal. We certainly don’t want, you know, the FBI raiding a bunch of fucking underground dens. But we sort of accept this premise with things like fatty and sugary foods and tobacco and guns, that there is some sort of regulation regime you have that takes certain basic steps. And one thing people are calling for, which I think would completely shock the industry, would be a ban on advertising of sports apps because the advertising is ubiquitous. There’s talks about, obviously, getting rid of things like single-player props because that’s where all the scandals have been. It’s the easiest way to sort of, especially if you go to the University of Bumfuck and you know, you’re a struggling student, some fucking shady Russian guy comes up to you and says, I’ll give you 10 grand, you know, then you have the speech from On the Waterfront. So let’s–
Dave Zirin: I’m trying to picture all of that in dumbfuck though — or bumfuck.
Adam: So, where do you envision that line? With accepting the premise that nobody wants to have the FBI or the NYPD go raid some basement somewhere and put a bunch of people in prison but certainly having unfettered corporate greed parasitically destroying the sports media industry and turning 21-year-old kids into degenerate gamblers, maybe not the best idea.
Dave Zirin: Well, sports media is almost, for all intents and purposes, destroyed. If you look at the crisis recently of Sports Illustrated, ESPN’s [47:10?] embrace of the gambling industry. I mean, even basketball leaving TNT because of the greed of David Zaslav. I mean, that’s something you thought maybe they wouldn’t touch. But now, Charles Barkley is talking about retiring after next year, which I think that’ll make a lot of people sad. But Barkley’s another one who is throwing out parlays with Kenny Smith in every playoff game. I mean, although, you know, I’m not holding Barkley and Kenny Smith to the standards of somebody who is at ESPN, looking at you like, you know, very seriously about the latest issue in sports. And, oh, hey, by the way, you know, here’s your parlay. And as you can probably tell, it aggravates me greatly, partly because it happened so goddamn quickly, and it’s changed the landscape really dramatically. And, you know, there’s no more shows on ESPN like Outside the Lines, which would have done shows about gambling and its effect on sports. What does the Shohei Ohtani story say about, you know, how vulnerable players are to gambling? You know, there’s none of that. There’s just like articles about, oh, this player has been suspended for suspicious gambling. And then at the top, there’s, you know, ESPN BET as a big banner right on top of it.
Adam: I mean, they go into damage control mode, and it’s all bad apple stuff. I mean, to the extent they talk about it, it’s a moral failure on the part of the individual. Of course, there’s never going to be an existential — and if we missed it, by all means, someone share it. But I’ve never seen it.
Dave Zirin: No, the one thing that haunts the discussion, though, is boxing and horse racing, which you know, in 1950, along with baseball were the two most popular sports in the land. And those sports were eventually hollowed out by gambling, the further and further search for profit. And it became an operation that Americans, in the broadest sense, said, yeah, maybe this isn’t going to be our pastime. And given now the competition for people’s eyeballs, the sports world is in its own crisis. Every single sport has an aging population of viewership, and they’re trying to figure out how to change that. And this is what’s so insidious about this, is that they see this gambling in the apps as a way to do that. And so, yeah, we need absolutely serious reform. I’m with you on that, of course, we don’t want to empower a new goon squad to go after people doing this work. I mean, you know, you’d hate to see Ben Affleck led outside in cuffs for the world to see. I was, of course, being sarcastic. Of course, I’d like to see that. For Argo alone, Nima.
Nima: [Laughs] That’s right. Penance, finally.
Dave Zirin: Finally.
Nima: Thought he could skate by with Air, but no. We remember Argo. But here, Dave, look, obviously sports gambling is as old as sports itself. And indeed one reason why sports remain popular and has been throughout millennia. And what we’re talking about here, what we’ve been discussing is the changes in technology, the changes in speed, the changes in immediacy and ubiquity that is playing out as a real-time experiment. But Dave, as a sports fan, how do you feel like the recent extreme, precipitous rise in gambling, what it means in the sports industry, how do you think that is changing sports? As a fan, not just as a thinker and a scholar and an author and a critic and a journalist, but as a fan.
Dave Zirin: As a fan, you feel it changing the tenor of the contest. I go to games a bunch, you know, they’re flashing the sportsbook stuff up constantly throughout the game. Players have reported, you know, people heckling them and yelling at them for their losses. The former coach of the Cavaliers, J. B. Bickerstaff talked about his family being threatened because somebody lost some bets. We talked about the players who’ve been caught up in this web. There’s now this thing led by Rudy Gobert and Luka Doncic being the most prominent examples of making dollar signs in front of referees when they disagree with their call, with their finger, drawing dollar signs in the air, which is meant to mean like, oh, you’re on the take. You’re one of the people doing this. And you know, the NBA knows that that’s not just trash talk at a ref, oh, you get a technical and maybe a fine. They fined Rudy Gobert a 100 grand for making the dollar sign, right? They’re serious about — do not even give a hint that this might not be on the up and up, not even a hint of it.
Because I think they also realize that, you know, the one thing that sports has over all other forms of entertainment, really, is that idea of the undetermined of what’s going to take place. And you can’t have that if people think the games themselves are not legit. I mean, that that is one of the things that hurt boxing for years and years and years. It almost destroyed college basketball in the early 1950s. People have to have some sense that what they’re watching is legitimate. And even though I do love professional wrestling, you know, it’s a different vibe altogether. So, this is where we are. It’s not a pleasant place. So, as a fan, there’s an undercurrent of ugliness. If anybody’s ever been to Vegas and had a negative experience, then that’s what it feels like sometimes, when you’re at these games and they’re bombarding you with sportsbooks stuff, everybody looks a little bit more desperate than they should. Everybody looks a little more angry than they should. And I really don’t think I’m projecting this because it’s flashing at us constantly. I mean, how could it not affect the fan experience?
Adam: Yeah, now, speaking as a fan, not a leftist, again, someone who consumes way too much sports media. There’s a sort of romance in sports. There’s always been gambling. No one’s denying that. But there is a sort of threshold you cross. Rather than the sort of side thing or this thing that’s maybe kind of always there. Again, Bob Costas talks about how we go to baseball games with his dad, and his dad would be $1,200 in the game back in the 1960s. Again, we’re not saying it’s new, but there’s sort of democratization for want of a better term. The ubiquity, it begins to sort of take away the sort of pretense. Again, I admit it’s false, right? But there is a sort of romance.
And maybe the one benefit is you no longer get all the bullshit, like, you know, student athletes. Well, you actually, you still get it with the student athlete moralizing, the kind of love of the game crap. Because within five years, they went from can’t pay students — or even four years — can’t pay students, “student athletes.” You know, it’s love of the game. It’s all about grades. Oh, by the way, this person is now a poker chip, and we’re making millions and millions of dollars off of Caitlin Clark or off Zion Williamson — I guess it would have been before that. But there’s all this sort of bullshit romance and nostalgia. And, you know, went to my first Spurs game, my dad gave me my first beer. All the stuff people associate with sports is just not even remotely there anymore. It’s just SVP talking about bad beats and shit. I mean, there’s a reason why the industry avoided it for decades. There’s a reason why it was seen as taboo. And it wasn’t because they don’t like the profit. I mean, it’s because they understood that in the long term, it has negative externalities.
Dave Zirin: No, and you know, there are a million reasons, if we want to go deep dive, that we can criticize people like Bart Giamatti and Fay Vincent, the commissioners of baseball into the 80s. In the early 90s, Fay Vincent, of course, who banned Pete Rose, Giamatti started that case. You look at like what they were wrestling with and reckoning with was not, my goodness, we don’t want more money. I mean, the money is there. I mean, Adam Silver acts like he found a big lost city of gold or something. Like, my god, look at this. Look at these revenues we could have. What do people think about it? When really it’s just a desperate attempt to keep young people, to addict young people to their games so they don’t become irrelevant. I mean, gambling in sports is more about the existential crisis of the leaks, wondering if they’re going to exist in a couple of generations and basically trying to bust out the store and get every last cent they can. Then, it has to do with them thinking they are somehow improving the fan experience.
Adam: Well, to them, it’s just money on the table. It’s almost like a violation of fiduciary duty if they don’t grab it. Because it’s like every single board meeting, everybody going, what are you, insane? Like, obviously you want to milk fucking Joe Bob sitting on his recliner in Virginia from your last fucking cent. You want to squeeze him dry.
Nima: David Stern’s like, What the hell did I do?
Dave Zirin: Yeah, the Giamatti Vincent thing is interesting to me because it’s not that they’re somehow these purists are romantics saying, forsooth, what are we going to do about the game? It’s like, yeah, this will end up screwing us in the end was their general argument. If we’re good with Pete Rose betting on his team, betting on other teams from a managerial position, we’re screwed, and we can’t even have the pretense of looking like we’re opening the door for that. Think about the number of scandals we’ve had just over the last several years. I mean, Pete Rose was a touchstone. Pete Rose was, good god, over 30 years ago. 30 years. And he was the touchstone for all those decades for why you can’t have gambling in sports. And now it’s, oh, by the way, this second baseman for Toronto bet five grand on himself. And that’s the other thing too. It’s like some people have come with the commentary of, why would these athletes risk $5,000 when they make millions of dollars a year? Why would they risk that? Because, you know, the leagues are going to impose, you know, what they call the death penalty anytime this takes place. So, it looks like they have zero tolerance while they’re also obviously trying to addict a new generation.
And what it is is athletes, you see this on social media. You see this in what they say. And now, you have this new industry of athletes having their own podcasts. I mean, there are issues with impulse control and boredom and being one of the most hyper-competitive people probably on Earth. And that’s why, you know, all the old stories that people chuckle about, about Michael Jordan gambling or playing dice or doing dominoes, everything for more and more money, that comes out of boredom. And that comes out of being hyper-competitive, that comes out of, you know, 12-hour road trips where you’re trying to figure out what you’re going to do to keep from losing your mind, and now that they’re working through their phones, you know? And this is just going to be a cascading set of scandals going forward. Promise you that.
Nima: How long until 30 for 30 does an expose on this, right? You know, this changed in five years. When might it change again? And then everyone does the old mea culpa.
Dave Zirin: I do think it’s inevitable that there’s going to have to be some sort of reckoning with gambling and in sports. And I also do believe that the proverbial line is out of the bottle. It ain’t becoming illegal again, but there’s going to have to be things like the banning of ads like you said, changing the safeguards that could be in place to keep young people off. I mean, if there are ways that that can be done, they want to figure out how to make them because it looks terrible. There’s a lot of things being talked about. One of them is mandatory cooling off periods for people where, you know, you’re losing money and, you know, talk about antithetical to capitalism. But that’s what a reckoning means, frankly, in a lot of different situations. A reckoning means we’re going to do something antithetical to what’s been working for us from a power and money perspective because it’s causing a broader crisis in the system itself. So, there’s going to have to be a reckoning. There will be a reckoning with gambling in sports and with that, will probably become somebody’s head or two like an Adam Silver or somebody, some big commissioner, will go down with it. And then there will be the inevitable 30 for 30, and it’ll be called something like “Too Much, Too Fast” or something like that, directed by Barbara Kopple.
Adam: Yeah, we don’t do a lot of liberal hand-wringing on the show, but this is one of these topics where it’s like, I think there is a kind of like libertarian instinct on the left, which I think can be good and especially when it comes around messaging. But I do think it becomes a fundamentally, neoliberal sort of concession, which is that, well, let’s say tomorrow we legalize cocaine, which I think we should do because, obviously, making it illegal is neither reducing people’s use of cocaine or not. But it doesn’t mean I want Philip Morris and Nestle cocaine advertising every day, all day, and pushing it here and there and doing sponsorships with NBC, you know what I mean? Like, it sort of seems like we sort of took this idea that, oh, well, once the toothpaste is out of the bottle, it won’t go back in again without realizing no, there’s a way of mitigating and managing and containing something that has obvious social harm, that almost every society, you know, it’s the world’s second oldest profession, right? Bookmaking. Every single society has some form of gambling going back to the Bronze Age. But there’s also an equally universal understanding that maybe this is something there should be certain social mores against.
And so, I think that sort of allergy of looking like a finger-wagging Baptist, I think, has made people kind of check their brains at the door on this topic. And again, there’s so much money to be made too, that kind of dovetails with it, right? Anyone who’s vaguely adjacent or wants to maybe work at ESPN or maybe work at Fox Sports, what are they going to do? Speak out against it? I mean, you would never have a career.
Dave Zirin: No, you never would, not in the current climate. And what’s the problem is that the people who we depend on to tell the stories about what sports gambling is doing to sports, I mean, they’re in the game. They’re in the game so we’re not getting it. And when we don’t get it, what we do is reproduce the normality of it over and over and over again, no matter, like you said, the societal effects.
Nima: We also just quickly want to touch on that this episode is coming out as the 2024 Olympics is going on in Paris and would love to know what you have going on this summer. Where can folks follow you, check out your work? What are you going to be looking for when you are over in Paris yourself?
Dave Zirin: I mean, it’s crazy. I’m going to be over there into early August. And so, going to be down there trying to cover as much of it as possible, doing some video there for the Real News Network and going to be writing articles for The Nation. And I’m working with a guy, Jules Boykoff who’s like one of the premier Olympic theorists out there, he’s a professor who writes these great anti-Olympic books. So, a lot going on. Jules and I are going to really do our best to bring that coverage of what NBC is not going to show you back to the States.
Nima: Nice, like the counter-Triumph of the Will live is what you guys are going to do. So, looking forward to it as always. Dave, such a pleasure to have you on the show. Of course, we’ve been speaking with long-time friend of Citations Needed. Dave Zirin (@edgeofsports), sports editor at The Nation magazine, host of the Edge of Sports podcast and its spinoff The Butterfly Effect, as well as Edge of Sports TV, which airs on The Real News Network. Dave is the author of 11 books on the politics of sports, including What’s My Name, Fool?, Brazil’s Dance With The Devil, Welcome to the Terrordome, A People’s History of Sports in the United States, and Jim Brown: Last Man Standing. His most recent is The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World, published by The New Press in 2022. Follow him everywhere @EdgeofSports. Dave, thank you again, sir, for joining us on Citations Needed.
Dave Zirin: No, thank you both. I really appreciate it.
[Music]
Adam: Yeah, I think when there’s billions of dollars going into a flailing industry like sports media or sports journalism, you know, random podcasters who just want to talk about the Bills’ nickel defense, they don’t give a shit if it’s funded by DraftKings or whatever. And I understand that, I wouldn’t judge anyone for that, given, again, the lack of funding in media in general. A lack of financial support. And these guys just see big dollar signs. And so, institutionally, they have zero incentive to provide any existential critique or any real kind of investigative or hard-hitting journalism. And so, there’s just kind of a gentleman’s agreement when we talk about the problems, to completely individualize it and bad-apples it.
Nima: Because the system is just allowing itself to be predatory. I mean, it’s saying, we’re going to be predatory for extreme profit. And in some cases, you know, the calculation is made that they’re doing this for survival. And also, they’re like, now it’s legal so fuck it. But you know, as we were discussing with Dave, the effects that this has not only on people, right, and now, how easy it is to make bets from your cell phone and how algorithms continue that kind of exploitative and predatory nature of advertising of what we’re seeing pop up when we’re interested in reading some analysis about last night’s game, that kind of shit, plus what it does to how we even understand sports journalism, how we understand the big business of athletics at the highest level when they are now partnering, as we were discussing at the top of the show, you know, ESPN, having $2 billion deals with sportsbooks, right? Kind of changing the nature of even how we understand how to cover sports, how to be a fan of sports because now, all of these things that were already intertwined, obviously, not to be naive about it but were previously intertwined, but now are legitimate corporate partnerships for the purpose of profit, and I would argue, to the detriment of actual sports and even being a fan of sports.
Adam: It’s not even about where it is today. I think it’s about where it’s going to be in 5, 10 years and what the plan is to rein in the industry and make it so it’s not sports media and sports journalism is not just a vehicle to get you to hand over your debit card information and piss it away. Not to be too teary eyed and sort of newsroomy and Sorkiny about it, but the media ought to have higher standards. It ought to have higher ideals. Even if it is entertainment media, it’s still a media outlet. It’s still something that people look at and assume that they can trust it. And when it basically becomes a vehicle to push you to piss away your money, it’s a symptom of a broader problem in our society, I think.
Nima: So, that will do it for this episode of Citations Needed. Thank you all for listening. Of course, you can follow the show on Twitter @citationspod, Facebook at Citations Needed and become a supporter of the show through patreon.com/citationsneededpodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated as always, a very special shout-out goes to our critic-level supporters through Patreon.
I’m Nima Shirazi.
Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: Our senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Producer is Julianne Tveten. Production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. Newsletter by Marco Cartolano. Transcriptions are by Mahnoor Imran. The music is by Grandaddy. Thanks again, all. We’ll catch you next time.
[Music]
This Citations Needed episode was released on Wednesday, July 31, 2024.
Transcription by Mahnoor Imran.
