Having swallowed sports media, will gambling now devour other kinds of news? Last week, CNN announced a deal with Kalshi, a federally regulated online exchange where Americans can wager on current events, from basketball games and congressional elections to whether it will rain tomorrow in New York City. This marked Kalshi’s first partnership with a major news organization and, according to several close observers of the media business and gambling industry, could foreshadow a deluge of similar deals. After all, a decade ago, many outlets refused to even mention sports-betting odds. Then, in a blink, the shilling became inescapable.

Gambling has been creeping into political coverage for a while. Prediction markets, as sites like Kalshi are called, use odds that can also be interpreted as probabilities, and, because those odds reflect the distilled wisdom of everyone willing to put skin in the game, they have the allure of a crystal ball. A prediction market associated with the magazine Le Point, for example, has anticipated the results of the past two French Presidential elections more accurately than top polling firms. It’s now routine for American journalists, when assessing the state of a political race, to cite betting odds as a counterpoint to polls. Shortly after unveiling its partnership with Kalshi, however, CNN seemed willing to integrate gambling to a far more jarring degree.

While discussing the strain of tariffs, anchor John Berman teed up Harry Enten, CNN’s chief data analyst, for a Kalshi plug, asking if Americans expect to receive stimulus checks from the government. “One of the best ways we can look at this is [through] the prediction markets,” Enten replied, “because they give you an indication of where people are putting their money where their mouth is.” The screen behind him showed that bettors on Kalshi peg the likelihood of checks arriving by next August at twenty-five per cent. Throughout the segment, a ticker displayed a stream of unrelated odds, including whether Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth would be the first person to depart from this Administration’s Cabinet (thirty-one per cent), and whether Time magazine’s Person of the Year would be Pope Leo XIV (twelve per cent) or A.I. (forty-seven per cent).

A couple of days later, CNBC announced a deal with Kalshi, too. “Every day, our reporters unpack the biggest questions facing companies and the economy,” CNBC president KC Sullivan wrote to me in an e-mail. “They will now have access to exclusive data from Kalshi to more deeply understand public sentiment in real time.” He declined to elaborate on what, exactly, makes this data exclusive. In recent years, sports-gambling operators have paid media outlets handsomely for sending customers their way, as much as five hundred dollars after a person clicks a link and creates a sportsbook account. Sullivan said CNBC’s arrangement with Kalshi includes “a customer acquisition component,” but the larger terms of that deal, as well as the one with CNN, haven’t been disclosed.

Both CNN and Kalshi declined to comment for this piece. After Kalshi’s C.E.O., Tarek Mansour, told Axios that the network isn’t paying to license Kalshi data, several people I spoke with took that to mean that no money was changing hands in the deal. A CNN source clarified that Kalshi is paying CNN to be the only prediction market referenced in coverage, though CNN’s articles won’t feature clickable links directing readers to Kalshi. Last month, meanwhile, Yahoo Finance announced an agreement to exclusively cite betting data from Kalshi’s rival Polymarket, a crypto-based prediction market.

Suddenly, prediction markets have a lot of money to spend. When I reported in 2022 on the potential for more betting on politics, those platforms existed in the U.S. either as tightly controlled academic experiments, or illegally. In the years since, federal courts have denied attempts by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to restrict election betting, allowing Kalshi and its competitors to run rampant—at least while more lawsuits make their way through the courts. These companies argue that their product doesn’t meet the legal definition of gambling, even when users risk money on the outcomes of professional and college sporting events, which now account for the vast majority of betting on Kalshi. Several states have sued, accusing the company of functioning, in essence, as an unlicensed bookie. (The country’s two leading sportsbooks, FanDuel and DraftKings, faced an interesting dilemma: stand beside the gaming lobby in its fight against prediction markets, or join the fray, seizing on the loophole that allows sites such as Kalshi and Polymarket to operate in states that have yet to legalize bookmaking, such as California and Texas. Soon enough, both sportsbooks announced plans to launch their own prediction markets in the near future.)

Kalshi is valued at eleven billion dollars—making the co-founder Luana Lopes Lara, at twenty-nine, “the world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire,” according to Forbes. Polymarket isn’t far behind; in October, Intercontinental Exchange invested two billion dollars in the company, reflecting an eight-billion-dollar valuation. In a recent interview on “60 Minutes,” Polymarket’s twentysomething C.E.O., Shayne Coplan, said he’d like to see the company grow in the coming years from “mid-hundreds of thousands” of users to a billion. To help achieve such grand ambitions, Kalshi and Polymarket brought on Donald Trump, Jr., as an adviser. (When Saudi Arabia’s leader, Mohammed bin Salman, received a warm welcome at the White House recently, he appeared to return the favor by promoting prediction markets, noting that people could have bet on whether he would have arrived dressed in a suit, as opposed to his traditional robes.)

As they fight for survival in court, Kalshi and Polymarket are also battling to be taken seriously, though their advertising doesn’t always advance that cause. Ahead of New York’s mayoral election last month, a billboard for Polymarket in Times Square showed Zohran Mamdani and Andrew Cuomo face to face, but with their photos edited to give them bare chests, like prizefighters at a weigh-in. (The race drew nearly half a billion dollars in bets on Polymarket.) Both platforms offer a variety of “mention” markets, allowing people to bet on things like whether OpenAI C.E.O. Sam Altman would say the word “privacy” during an appearance on “The Tonight Show.”

For Kalshi, the imprimatur of CNN and CNBC could go a long way. A ticker advertising Kalshi’s betting odds and displaying Kalshi’s logo while journalists tout the credibility of that data “is a very legitimizing force for a gambling company,” Oliver Darcy, a media reporter who left CNN last year to start a newsletter, Status, told me. Like so many ailing news outlets, he said, CNN is in a tough spot; earlier this year, the company said it would lay off about two hundred employees—roughly six per cent of its workforce. “I think that’s loosened their standards for potential partners tremendously,” Darcy said, adding that the Kalshi deal seemed ethically and editorially “dubious.”

A former longtime CNN journalist, who requested to remain anonymous, objected to the deal on different grounds, saying that it seemed “gimmicky” for the network to be promoting betting odds. “Do they really believe it’s adding value to the coverage?”

The value of the data depends on the liquidity of a particular market; generally, the more money wagered, the more predictive the odds. There is no magic threshold for when a market should be taken seriously, but many of the most-cited election markets attract tens of millions of dollars in trading, at least. When Enten lauded the benefits of analyzing betting odds, on air the other day, he failed to mention that only several hundred thousand dollars had been bet on that particular market. Kalshi’s odds provided good fodder for television, but, statistically speaking, they didn’t say much.

How many news organizations, desperate for cash and for clicks, will move in a similar direction? Dan Pozner was the director of gambling content and partnerships at NBC Sports in 2020 when the company struck its first partnership with a sportsbook, PointsBet (since acquired by Fanatics, which just launched a prediction market in two dozen states). Some traditionalists at NBC were reluctant to promote gambling, Pozner recalled, but the prevailing mentality was, “They need to do what everyone else is doing to keep up, or they’re going to miss out.” Pozner doesn’t think many news organizations will get hung up on moral reservations this time, either. I heard something similar from Dustin Gouker, a reporter who also spent years facilitating affiliate marketing deals with media companies, and who now publishes a newsletter about prediction markets, Event Horizon. He agrees that CNN, CNBC, and Yahoo Finance will likely be trendsetters: “Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Fox News, and on and on—why wouldn’t all of them do something like this?”

It’s easy to see the synergy between news and gambling on the news. Kalshi said it will create certain markets at CNBC’s request, though many news stories already have a corresponding betting market. After the Times published a front-page story last month about mounting evidence of the President showing his age, the odds on Kalshi that he’d be out of office by the end of next year increased to twenty-nine per cent. Kalshi is also accepting bets on extreme weather, like markets for whether an 8.0-magnitude earthquake will strike California before year’s end, or whether Mt. Etna will erupt in the same time frame. (There’s a one-per-cent and fifty-seven-per-cent chance, respectively.)

Of course, there’s something ghoulish about profiting from natural disasters—or wars. Polymarket takes bets on whether Israel will strike Gaza on a given day. There can also be strange feedback loops, Andrew Hall, a political scientist at Stanford, explained. (Hall also advises the venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, an investor in Kalshi.) With political markets especially, “the news affects the prices, and then the prices are part of the news,” Hall told me. Coverage of Hegseth having the greatest odds of being the first Cabinet secretary ousted, for example, could boost those odds further, which could generate more coverage, which could eventually drive the President to fire him.

Entanglements with prediction markets might create other problems for journalists. Considering how significantly news coverage shapes betting odds, there’s ample opportunity for insider trading. Accentuating that conflict, news organizations are often designated as the source of truth for resolving a market. For example, Kalshi takes bets on whether certain people, such as the rapper Drake or the Pope, will visit the White House this year. The outcomes of those bets are determined by reporting in various outlets, including CNN. Kalshi’s rules prohibit any employee of a news outlet, anyone with “material non-public information,” or anyone with “the ability to influence the outcome of the contract” from trading. But, as Gouker, the Event Horizon writer, asked, “Are they actually stopping them?” Earlier this year, a Republican candidate for governor in California, Kyle Langford, said he bet a hundred dollars on Kalshi that he would win the election. Of course, he was prohibited from doing so, but the bet apparently went through. Kalshi said it was investigating.

There is a case to be made that, in moderation, engaging with prediction markets might serve a public good. Literally investing in news stories could make people more interested in keeping up with the news. It could even help combat misinformation. In 2023, Nature published results from a study in which skeptics and believers in climate change had to bet on short-term indicators of a planet in crisis, such as higher monthly temperatures, worsening air quality, and more extreme weather. Some skeptics nevertheless wagered on those outcomes, and after winning money over a couple of months, they were more inclined to call themselves believers in climate change. “If you win, whatever you win at becomes, to some extent, your identity,” one of the co-authors, the Columbia University neuroscientist Moran Cerf, told me.

Of course, persuading people that the Pope is a long shot to be Time’s Person of the Year is, as the University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers put it, “entirely inconsequential.” (Time ultimately selected the “Architects of A.I.” On social media, many Kalshi users were irate to learn that bets on simply “A.I.,” the front-runner, were deemed a loss—illustrating how betting on the news sometimes fails to produce decisive outcomes.) A frequent guest commentator on CNN, Wolfers proposed a two-part test for whether journalists should invoke betting markets: “Is the information socially valuable, and is this the best mechanism for eliciting it?”

“One of the reasons I think it’s really useful in politics,” he explained, “is if you’re running a company and you need to know what’s going to happen to the tariffs, you could turn on Fox News and learn that tariffs are amazing and they’re going to continue forever. Or, you could turn on MSNBC and learn that tariffs are terrible and they’re going to be gone any minute now. In reality, you’re learning nothing either way. The market is a truth-telling device.”

Yet, despite being an early adopter of prediction-market data in his punditry, Wolfers said he’s grown concerned about news organizations promoting the betting platforms too aggressively. “There’s one group who are completely unrepresented in the policy debate,” he explained, “and they might be the most important, and that’s the compulsive gamblers.”

Wolfers grew up in gambling-crazed Australia, where he worked at a horse-racing track during college. He remembers placing the first-ever bet for one of his friends, who, over the next few years, developed a gambling addiction that caused him to sell his car, steal, and drive his father’s business into bankruptcy. “It was one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen,” Wolfers told me. As gambling is normalized in so many corners of American life, he said, “I’m worried about a mom or a dad throwing away their family’s future because this is addictive in a way that we know that hard drugs are.”

Signs of a potential gambling-fuelled public-health crisis emerge by the day. Last month, for instance, Bank of America reported that Sallie Mae and other student-loan giants face growing pressure because young people are losing so much money betting on sports, whether through traditional sportsbooks or through prediction markets. CNN and CNBC have devoted a significant amount of airtime to the dangers of online gambling, including a CNN documentary this past summer in which reporter Nick Watt challenged the head of the gaming lobby for refusing to concede that sports betting can be addictive.

The people behind prediction markets can be even more callous, while also offering even more opportunities to bet. (Last month, Mansour, the C.E.O. of Kalshi, said that the “long-term vision” for the company “is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.”) At a gaming conference in July, Josh Sterling, an attorney for Kalshi, was asked if regulators should enforce more consumer protections. “People are adults,” he answered, “and they’re allowed to spend their money however they want it, and if they lose their shirt, that’s on them.” ♦