Your emotional reaction to sports betting, and gambling in general, is understandable -- even if I don't agree with what you're saying about it, I see where you're coming from.
Yeah, I do have fun with the writing part of these posts. That doesn't mean what I'm writing isn't serious.
But that said, what is your solution? That radio programmers play morality police? Sooner or later the ultimate decision is up to the individual -- whether they gamble, or don't gamble. Sports betting is very popular. Millions of people have voted for the idea by participating. Even some NFL football games have the announcers talking about what the odds were in Las Vegas that one of the two teams would win.
It's one thing to *discuss* the odds, or how the teams stack up in a sports talk program. That's
information. It's something else to run programming whose
primary purpose is to entice listeners to gamble their money on games, and oh by the way, we have a betting platform for them to do it on. Heads we win, tails you lose. It's not exactly like the betting programs are soft and understated, it's a hard sell.
More people's lives are probably ruined by alcohol consumption than sports betting. Yet there are liquor ads all over the internet. It seems half the ads I see on YT music vids are advertising some sort of alcoholic beverage (their algorithm is a bit off, perhaps -- I don't even drink). I think the Super Bowl TV ads have a lot of them, too. The visual ads I see on the internet make liquor and alcohol consumption look quite glamorous. Would you also ban those?
Turns out the FCC used to ban hard liquor ads on broadcast TV and radio. Not sure what year that changed. (Maybe when the NAB Code of Conduct, or whatever it was formally called, was found to be restraint of trade by the courts.) Beer ads were legal as far back as I can recall, and wine ads started being run in (IIRC) the Sixties, when big producers like E & J Gallo and Paul Masson realized TV and radio could be effective vehicles for boosting sales. But you never saw or heard spots for the hard stuff, whether or not the networks or stations would have loved to have that extra revenue. I presume the blowback wasn't thought to be worth it.
You know, radio people -- including some here I've disagreed with from time to time -- are pretty smart, and savvy people. They have to be, to survive in the medium.
Generally, I agree with you about that. Though I've met a few morons in my time.
They realize that they are providing a service and they need advertisements to make a living. And they don't have the legal or scientific resources at their fingers to test every product, research all claims extensively, or even -- in the case of sports betting -- research all of the statistical liabilities of betting on sports,
You don't need to research or test every product that's being advertised on your property. You just need to do it with those few that don't pass the sniff test. And, I think, it's as simple as, would you want your son or daughter or sibling to buy that Balance of Nature pill, or gamble away their paycheck, or get sloshed every weekend? Would you want your kid to OD on a pill that might be 80% fentanyl? If you wouldn't buy/use/drink/bet it, and you wouldn't want your own family members to do the same, then maybe you should think twice about accepting ads for it.
Ethics isn't all that freakin' difficult.
And at the same time, they have bills to pay.
Sports betting is immensely popular. It's legal in much of the US. Ultimately it's the listener's decision to determine what they do with the sports betting information. In my case, I see it subsidizing the other sports talk. KGO San Francisco runs WW1 NFL play by play and other, more regular Sports Talk programming. It's not Sports Bet talk 24-7.
As I've written before, I take a special interest in KGO. I've met some of their previous honchos. I've been to the station and the transmitter by the South Bay. Hell, I can look out my window and see their towers. They pump out 50KW up and down the west coast. It pains me a bit that their flamethrower signal is being wasted in an effort to ensnare a small number of listeners in a scheme to lose their lunch money. Shove that crap on the tertiary signal up on 1050, not on either of the 680 or 810 flamethrowers.
If you can't pay your bills without scamming your listeners, maybe you should sell the stations, or donate them to a non-profit, or just turn in the license. Because even if they're not technically bankrupt (in the financial sense), they definitely are in the moral one.
Maybe if an NYC station flips to sports-bet talk they'll do what KGO does -- mix it with other sports talk programming. Like I said, WFAN's website has a portal to BetQL. KGO is running sports bet talk segments in much the same way -- including it in the rest of the sports programming.
I guess the question is, how much of the programming goes to sports betting? 20% on weekends? 60% of 24x7? KGO's a lot closer to the latter, and I'd hate to see one of the legacy clears in NYC move in the same direction.
If it happened on some pipsqueak signal up in the graveyard, I've bite my lip and ignore it. But WCBS? or WFAN? Or WINS, WEPN, WOR, WABC, etc? No, absolutely not. If those owners can't program better quality stuff -- and it's not like there are no other options -- then they should turn in (or lose) their license(s).
