Every once in a while, I think maybe I’m being a little paranoid.
Well, I always feel paranoid, but I’m speaking specifically about feeling paranoid about mainstream media’s hate affair with the sports betting industry.
Latest example? That ridiculous “Sucker” piece in The Atlantic, in which a Mormon man, opposed to gambling, is given $10,000 of the magazine’s money so he could go out, bet on sports, and tell everyone how it’s ruining society. It was a hatchet job. Painful. Made me reach for some hard drugs.
Of course, it’s not just The Atlantic. Rolling Stone took a swing, The New York Times has practically made a cottage industry of it, you name the media outlet, I’ll show you the hit piece.
As it turns out, though, I’m not paranoid.
As it turns out, the media has been going hard — like, extra hard, like, “hey man, relax!” hard — at the sports betting industry.
This is not my opinion. This is, for the first time, backed up by actual data.
Meet the GPPC
A new self-funded study from Gaming Public Policy Consulting, titled “Addressing the Narrative Gap,” did something no one had really done before: It measured just how negatively the media covers gambling compared to other so-called vices. We’re talking tobacco, opioids, cannabis, alcohol, the whole fun crew (don’t do drugs, kids).
The result? Gambling coverage was the most negatively biased of all of them. And it wasn’t particularly close, either. Gambling articles scored a -48 on a bias scale that runs from negative 100 to positive 100, according to the study. Everything else averaged -15. Gambling was also the most slanted in raw terms, meaning even the articles that weren’t openly anti-gambling had more spin than coverage of other vices.
Then there were the headlines. Using an academic tool called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, GPPC analyzed the actual words in the headlines. They found 57% of gambling headlines used “persuasion-oriented language.” Non-gambling vice headlines checked in at 39%. Meanwhile, objective, fact-based language showed up in 97% of non-gambling headlines, but only 85% of gambling ones.
In short, gambling headlines are built to make you feel something, not learn something.
“It became so evident,” Mackenzie Slade, CEO of Gaming Public Policy Consulting, told InGame. “Everyone I knew who knew I was entering the gambling space for public-health research would constantly send me new articles every day. Similar headlines, similar nature, very moral panic.”
Slade comes from the cannabis and opioid public-health worlds, and she said the pattern is familiar. But she’s careful not to oversell the comparison, because cannabis at least has recognized medicinal benefits. Gambling doesn’t have that card to play.
What gambling does have is a media environment that has turned statistical noise into a five-alarm fire.
Hysteria
The study looked at a series of stories concerning the gambling industry as case studies.
For instance, a Massachusetts helpline story made national news. CBS ran a headline about calls to the state’s problem-gambling hotline being up 121% in a year. But a third of those calls were people asking for help logging into their sportsbook accounts. Tech support, not crisis calls. And when you look at how many calls actually led to treatment referrals, that number went down, from 31% to 20%.
The study also went after a JAMA-published paper that used Google searches for “am I addicted to gambling” as evidence that addiction was rising. The issue? Google’s autocomplete is shaped by what’s in the news. So the same fear-driven media coverage the report documents could be juicing the very search data the study was built on. The study proved people are Googling stuff. That’s about it.
And then there’s the big one, the claim you see everywhere: Legal sports betting is causing more problem gambling. On this, the research GPPC cited is pretty clear, and it says the opposite of what the headlines say, that the evidence so far does not establish that legalization causes higher levels of problem gambling. The best before-and-after study, out of Canada, found no change. A recent U.S. study compared states that legalized with states that didn’t and found no difference in problem-gambling severity.
What GPPC did find, using its own national survey of nearly 18,000 people, is that roughly 23% of lifetime gamblers had done some form of illegal or unregulated gambling in the past year. And those people had risky gambling scores roughly three times higher than people who stuck to legal options. Furthermore, the study found problem-gambling scores were highest in states with no legal sports betting at all.
So it’s not that regulation is causing the problem, per the study. It might be that the lack of it is.
What do we know?
“I genuinely believe the biggest challenge in gambling policy right now isn’t deciding what to do, it’s deciding what we actually know,” Slade told InGame. “Everyone needs to calm down with saying here’s the prescription for getting gambling policy right. What do we actually know, and how do we increase what we know?”
She’s also clear about where this goes if nothing changes. The sensationalized coverage increases stigma, and stigma keeps people from getting help. It feeds the prohibition crowd.
“This journalistic style of if it bleeds it leads, it has to stop,” Slade told InGame. “I was reading an article the other day, and I’m even hesitant to talk about it out loud. It was such a clear exploitation of people’s horrible tragedies to facilitate either clicks or a narrative.”
Slade was also careful about what the report is not saying.
“Gambling is a problem,” she told InGame. “We’re not trying to make claims that it’s not, or that it’s not as severe as people are saying, or that these stories don’t matter. It’s just to say we have to slow down and decide what we actually know.”
But the media isn’t slowing down. And the data now says what a lot of us in this space have felt for a while: The coverage isn’t just negative. It’s measurably more biased than the way the media covers opioids, tobacco, or alcohol.
