(Photo by: STRF/STAR MAX/IPx via AP)
When federal prosecutors charged Terry Rozier and Chauncey Billups this week, cable news and sports networks delivered their lines with appropriate solemnity. Gambling scandals, they intoned, strike at the very integrity of the game. Then they broke for commercial — brought to you by FanDuel, DraftKings, and, because irony is dead, ESPN Bet.
No one at the anchor desk mentioned the contradiction. No one could afford to.
Here’s what’s actually happening, and it’s a story you won’t see reported on those same broadcasts: America is living through the fastest normalization of addiction infrastructure in commercial history, and the institutions that should be covering it have been bought into silence.
This isn’t just a basketball story. It’s a media story — about money, moral blindness, and what happens when the people paid to tell the truth start taking a cut of the lie.
Since the Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on sports betting in 2018, the floodgates have opened. According to the American Gaming Association, Americans legally wagered $147.9 billion on sports in 2024 — a staggering 23% increase from the previous year and more than double what was bet just three years earlier.
That flood of money fuels a marketing blitz unlike anything in modern media. Sportsbooks spent well over a billion dollars on advertising last year, per AGA and MediaRadar analyses, with gambling ads now accounting for nearly half a percent of all television ad volume. Nielsen reports that gambling companies aired more than $434 million in sportsbook commercials during televised sports in 2024, according to iSpot.
Turn on a game and you’re no longer watching sports — you’re watching a gambling product with sports inside it. You can’t simply “watch” sports anymore; you’re being relentlessly invited to wager on them.
The effect is hypnotic, especially for younger viewers already glued to their phones who confront a constant, algorithmic whisper that sports are no longer just for watching, but for betting. Nielsen data and multiple university studies show that during live games, gambling promotions now appear every one to two minutes — woven into halftime shows, jersey patches, and in-game commentary.
This isn’t incidental; it’s engineered. And it’s working.
Calls to the National Problem Gambling Helpline increased 150% between 2018 and 2023, according to data from the National Council on Problem Gambling. Pennsylvania’s Council on Compulsive Gambling saw call volume more than double from 2020 to 2023. In Ohio, calls jumped 55% in 2023 alone, the first year of legalized sports betting there.
These apps are algorithmically optimized behavioral traps. A 2023 Guardian investigation found that DraftKings sent an average of 67 promotional notifications per week to active users, many targeting people who’d stopped betting. The house edge on a typical parlay is north of 30%, according to the American Gaming Association’s own data. That’s not entertainment. That’s a tax on dopamine and bad math.
And yet, the outlets covering sports can’t tell this story honestly — because they’re getting paid not to.
ESPN doesn’t just run betting ads; it is a betting company. ESPN Bet, launched in 2023, is a revenue-sharing partnership with Penn Entertainment. Every wager sends a cut to Disney. Fox Sports had Fox Bet. CBS partners with Caesars. NBCUniversal inked deals with PointsBet. And online, more than 70% of sports publishers carry affiliate links to sportsbooks, earning a commission for every new bettor. The Athletic, Bleacher Report, Sports Illustrated — even articles about gambling addiction often include links to place a bet.
And this is precisely why the coverage of this story focuses on the symptom and not the larger problem itself. You can’t investigate your own paycheck. And so the fastest-growing public-health crisis in sports is being politely ignored by the only institutions capable of explaining it.
We’ve seen this movie before. Tobacco ads saturated culture until cancer data made it impossible to look away. Opioids followed the same script: glossy marketing, addicted users, belated outrage. Now sports betting is running the same playbook — only faster, smarter, and with better data. The apps know when you’re losing, when you’re chasing, when to ping your phone.
When Rozier and Billups were charged, that wasn’t just a failure of individual character. It was a system functioning exactly as designed. Saturate sports with gambling, make insider information valuable, and invite organized crime into a $120-billion market — and you’re going to get corruption.
The networks will feast on this story for weeks. It’s juicy: famous names, locker room intrigue, the irresistible whiff of scandal. But what they won’t say — what they can’t say — is that this isn’t an isolated lapse of judgment. It’s the predictable consequence of a country quietly rewired around legalized gambling.
Since 2018, sports betting has gone from vice to wallpaper. It’s not just permitted; it’s promoted relentlessly, hypnotically, every ninety seconds. And the reason the media won’t connect those dots is simple: they’re on the payroll. The same outlets framing this as a morality play are cashing checks from the very companies driving the addiction.
So yes, they’ll cover the scandal. They just won’t cover the cause. Because in the end, the media isn’t exposing the casino. It’s working for the house — and business has never been better.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.