How we're covering gambling scandals
We’re already almost a third of the way through 2024, and while my Nieman Lab prediction of a major scandal involving sports journalism and sports gambling hasn’t happened yet, two of the biggest stories of the year so far have involved sports gambling.
There’s the weird Shohei Ohtani story, where his former friend and interpreter allegedly stole more than $16 million from the Dodgers star to fund gambling debts.
There’s also Jontay Porter being banned for life from the NBA for disclosing confidential information to gamblers, among other sins.
I’m honestly surprised the Porter story wasn’t a much bigger scandal. This is one of the nightmare scenarios for sports leagues — a player telling gamblers insider information about what’s going to happen in a game, and then tailoring his participation to fit that information and help the gamblers win their bets. It’s almost the textbook definition of fixing a game.
While stories have kind of run their course in the sports media world and we moved on to the NCAA women’s basketball tournament straight, the NFL draft and the NBA playoffs, legal and accessible sports gambling is enveloping everything in the sports world. It’s the new world we live in.
One of the stories from this year that has stuck with me is Dana O’Neil’s piece in The Athletic about how walk-on college basketball players are getting death threats from gamblers after hitting what in every previous generation would be called meaningless buckets but aren’t because you can easily bet on anything and everything.
This is the sporting world we live in, and it’s interesting to watch how this is playing out and how sports media is covering these stories.
A brief aside.
The overall reaction to legal and accessible gambling has been fascinating to watch. Before 2018, it felt like legalizing sports gambling was a pretty popular issue. Sports and gambling have forever been interconnected, and people seemed to want to be able to bet on sports. But in the past few months, it feels like there’s a popular backlash to it. To be clear, I have no data on this, just vibes.
Gambling feels similar to NIL and the transfer portal in this regard. For decades, it’s been a popular point that college students should get paid and should be able to transfer (given the way coaches can leave jobs). But now the NIL and transfer portal are reality, the reaction seems to be, “No, not like THAT.”
Same with gambling. We want it legal. But not the way it’s legal now.
And I think the key part of this is the accessibility of gambling. This is the cornerstone of it, why I always talk about legal and accessible gambling. The fact that it’s legal matters, but the fact that it’s accessible is the point. It’s one thing if you can bet on sports but you have to physically go to a sports book to bet. The fact that you can bet on a game during a game from the phone you may be watching the game on is the (sorry) game changer here.
But back to how sports media are covering these stories. It was a Bluesky post from Daniel Fienberg, one of my favorite TV critics and the host of one of my all-time favorite podcasts1, that got me thinking about this
Think about how these stories have been covered so far. It’s a rogue actor, a bad person, an individual doing something wrong. It was Ohtani’s translator stealing money, and whether or not Ohtani was a dupe or not. It was Porter being galactically dumb. Even the walk-ons story is framed around the behavior of truly horrible people sending players DMs.
All of these stories are focused on the individual actors.
But when you have a number of individual actors doing similar things, you’ve got a systematic issue. Yes, people are responsible for their actions, but they are responsible for their actions within the system they live and work in2. Media coverage that focuses on the former without interrogating the latter is flawed, or at least a missed opportunity.
If you want to hear more from me about sports journalism and gambling, you can check out this piece from On The Media from earlier this month. Being on this show was an absolute career highlight, and I’m grateful to Rebecca Clark-Callendar for including me in it.
RIP Firewall and Iceberg.
#RadicalizedbyMaintenancePhase
The Jamie Moses/walk-on shots have always been a thing in gambling, whether you're talking Vegas or your local bookie. The expansion of gambling to include jerks like you and I that don't play by the same rules has exposed another ugly side.
That said, the first step to changing the trajectory on college gambling is to make it illegal to bet on a player, individually or in a parlay. New York, surprisingly, does it right in this case.