I think if these NY Times employees understood just how damaging Kalshi and other prediction markets were to young men they would support this deal. I suspect this position will be reversed in time.
Google was not helpful to me, but what exactly is the deal being discussed? Is NYT going to allow readers to place kalshi bets on their website / app? That would be even more damaging to young men IMO.
I'm placing a bet on "at least one NYT editor caught manipulating news stories so he can win Kalshi bets within one year" if a deal like this goes through.
How will that bet be resolved concretely, will you base it on a NYT headline?
In some grim way it will be interesting to see the how this evolves. I mean, in a way betting markets are parasitic on news agencies that have a reputation for objective reporting, in the sense that they need something that can be treated as objective to evaluate their bets. How will it shake out if reporting institutions become “part of the game.” If “editor at NYT” or “knows and editor at NYT” become an advantages that can be leveraged (either for advanced outcomes or to manipulate outcomes themselves).
Maybe the betting groups will eventually need to built institutions that are known for objective/prudent reporting that can be accessed equally, haha.
I really don’t understand how these markets survive a competent DOJ considering the rate they’re having to ban people for “insider trading”. Fully appreciate the Unions position here.
Most competent people at the DOJ have either been fired or left. And the current administration seems to love insider trading, so long as they can be the insiders doing the trading.
It lasts for now, it won’t survive when the political pendulum swings back. “Make hay grifting while the grifters shine.” is the current MO. “Temporary economic strip mining operation.”
Same old story, on a whole new scale. Donny Junior has a piece the numbers game on the east side, so the family makes sure the cops don’t come round asking too many questions…
> Donald Trump Jr. Got A Kalshi Stake For Free— Now It Could Be Worth Billions As Prediction Market Platform Eyes $40 Billion Valuation
> Kalshi handed him equity worth roughly $300,000 when he joined as a strategic adviser in early 2025. ... Kalshi granted him the stake when the company was valued at under $2 billion — less than a tenth of its $22 billion valuation in a funding round last month ...
Um, how does a $300K stake at an "under $2 billion" valuation become "worth billions" with a 10-50x valuation increase?
(Disclaimer: I'm not defending the Trump family in any way, the administration has been absurdly and blatantly corrupt.)
Still beating the same dead horse, huh? The Trump family's corruption is on a whole other scale, pretending otherwise is extremely disingenuous and bad faith. But else what would you expect from MAGA?
There's nobody left at the DoJ in a high enough position to do anything like this. I'm not a gambler myself, but if I were, I certainly wouldn't used something that seems made for insider traders and suckers.
what happened with Bill Simmons bragging about using his daughter's boyfriend to place proxy bets for him on FanDuel (who Bill is partnered with) is endlessly entertaining
Trump Jr. just pumped 300 million into Polymarket and also has a stake in Kalshi so, i'm not sure who thinks the DOJ will really do anything. this is fentanyl on the phone but there will have to be a few examples like some low-levels House members or state senators alongside sports casualites
Citizen's United was the nail in the coffin for honest journalism, because it sold out to those with the largest wallets. If you truly want truth in journalism support independent journalists financially, and with your attention. Ignore corporate media.
To me, the rules on how large a media conglomerate could get being changed in favor of allowing the conglomerate to grow even larger did some heavy lifting. Journalism publishers no longer have to compete since their all owned by the same limited number of owners.
I find it really interesting that online sports betting, which has been a thing in my country for 15+ years and largely a non-issue, is suddenly a total shitshow once it gets legalised in the US. I feel like the US always takes things too far. I watch quite a few US sports and former athletes giving betting suggestions during broadcasts is absolutely insane. How can you go from being so restrictive to having absolutely no limits overnight? To make matters worse I get the feeling the TV companies here are taking pointers from their US colleagues and starting to force us down the same path.
Not exactly. The law was weird, and that's why it was overturned. It didn't make sports betting illegal federally, instead it prevented states from "authorizing" it, which the petitioners argued was an unconstitutional intrusion into the lawmaking ability of states in that it prevented them from repealing laws against sports betting that they had previously passed.
The full ruling is at https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/16-476_dbfi.pdf, and the last paragraph sums it up: "Congress can regulate sports gambling directly, but if it elects not to do so, each State is free to act on its own".
The SCOTUS ruling didn't legalize sports betting; states chose to do that themselves once they were no longer prevented from doing so. Congress could ban it nationwide today, and probably they should.
Got really confused as why my granola bar company was signing a deal with the NYT and The Athletic, and why this was deemed so controversial, then I used Google and learned the difference between Kashi and Kalshi.
You do realise that countries other than the USA exist, right? The UK has had various forms of sports gambling legal for nearly 100 years and society hasn't crumbled and neither did sport.
You've been able to gamble on your mobile device for 100 years in the UK?
Modern gambling isn't you talking to a bookie and putting down $100 on your favorite team. That should still be legal. Phone apps which learn your behavior, your favorite teams, the offers you are likely to accept, the time of day that you're most likely to make a bet, etc etc and use that to barrage you with notifications, "free" plays, high paying parlays with horrible odds, should not be.
Society bears the downsides of gambling and gambling addiction, while the casinos gather all of the upside.
"A more recent survey in 2022, conducted by the United Kingdom Gambling Commission found that 'headline problem gambling rate is statistically stable at 0.2%. The moderate risk and low risk rates are also statistically stable at 0.9% and 1.4% respectively.'[45]"
Sports gambling is controlled by FTC in the US. Prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket found a loophole where they can run gambling operations under CFTC and and not be controlled by FTC. There needs to be some legislative actions from the Congress to close the loophole.
Incorrect. Ninth circuit ruled in favor of Nevada State, but earlier this year third circuit ruled in favor of Kalshi. So it's going to the Supreme Court.
All of the above is completely independent from what Congress can or cannot do.
The third circuit's opinion is poorly reasoned and its not binding precedent in California anyway, which can now regulate Kalshi because the ninth circuit's decision is binding precedent in California. Congress does not need to do anything, the law is clear that states can regulate gambling. The thought that Congress needs to address that is preposterous. They'll go through to same song and dance in the second circuit too - want to make a bet on how that'll turn out?
The stock market isn't fundamentally a gamble. Spending money to buy a share of a company's future dividends is a sound way to invest money and earn a return on it.
The problem with the stock market is when there aren't enough new companies going public to soak up the spigot of all the capital that people want to invest, leading average P/E ratios to increase over time. There is too much money chasing too few earnings. When the underlying fundamentals don't match up, then all that investors are doing is speculating that someone else will be the bigger fool and buy from them at an even more unreasonable price - and that is a gamble.
Sports gambling exists all around the world and less than 1% of people develop serious addictions, far less than develop alcohol addiction. It's not fair to ban the fun for everyone just because a small subset of people can't control themselves.
I'm sympathetic to this perspective, but the downstream negative externalities of sports gambling aren't just what happens to gambling addicts. The whole sport starts to revolve around the gambling - including strong incentives for players to "throw" games. I don't think integrity in sports can co-exist with a massive, legal gambling industry.
Unfortunately, this shows how much facts and reality have been turned into nothing more than a loyalty test by both sides of our political debate.
> A partnership between The Times (for The Athletic) and Kalshi would also provide validation that their prediction market data should be taken seriously as an indicator of the future. Facts prove otherwise.
They could have objected to the partnership on any number of valid grounds, like the fact that predicting the outcome of sporting events provides no valid benefit and can only ever be gambling, or that the integration is probably going to be pretty lame and provide no benefit to the reader.
Instead, they felt compelled to make a trivially false claim, the claim that prediction markets do not accurately predict the future. It's trivial to prove that this claim is false, because if it were true, it would be very easy for anyone to make a huge amount of money on prediction markets.
It's even more telling why they made this claim, to avoid "providing validation". Not because of any harms caused by sports gambling addiction, but because it could provide a tiny piece of political ammunition to a product that has been slotted into the opposing political tribe. Reading this statement, one gets the impression that they would be completely OK with sports gambling on The Athletic, as long as it was provided by a more traditional casino-style bookie operation.
I'm guessing that anyone in the room when this statement was written who even brought up the question of the facts could be safely sidelined and ostracized by the union as being insufficiently loyal to their political position.
In practical terms commercial prediction markets are unregulated gambling. That's where the money comes from. Stapling a vitamin C packet to your cigarette box doesn't diminish that you're selling cigarettes.
Christ, just say you are conservative and don't like unions and their political stances. 'Accuracy' doesn't matter at all when it comes to assessing harm, but the existence of a market signal itself can change outcomes, and then much vaunted 'accuracy' becomes a mechanism for fraud in a new and different way.
Even taking your nitpick a little bit seriously, behold:
> Retail prediction market traders pick winners 51.3% of the time yet lose money; automated traders achieve coin-flip accuracy yet earn $133 million.
The entire enterprise exists to move money from gamblers to companies. The externalities (suicide, social degradation) of this transaction is bourne by society.
Someone tampered with the weather equipment at Charles de Gaulle airport for a Polymarket bet. This sort of thing is going to become so much more common going forward.
It's always corrosive to society in a way other vices really aren't. Money is a massive influence and incentive, and in gambling you can artificially increase the possible incentive size with long shot bets.
The best part of how gambling makes everything shit is that gambling addicts will ruin the sanctity of everything that claims authenticity for just a few actual dollars of "profit", after you ignore all the money they've lost by betting, which addicts tend to do.
Assholes who insist betting on things are the best and totally great for the world somehow will harm a sports event that ten thousand people have paid a hundred dollars to enjoy just to earn a hundred bucks themselves.
They don't have much to say about Kalshi other than "unlike real mainstream journalism, there’s no accountability". Which isn't saying much, because nobody is claiming prediction markets are a type of journalism.
Journalism is one particular way of trying to learn about the world. Academics are another, the scientific method is a third, and so on.
Claiming that something is a better way to learn about the world is NOT the same as claiming it is using a specific method, or part of a specific tradition.
I’m open to being convinced, but if you’re claiming mainstream media has no accountability, I think you need to substantiate that.
I realize there are information bubbles on the internet where this is accepted as truth, but unexamined. Nonsense is everywhere on the internet. I’d be curious how you’d substantiate this.
You can just watch or read the mainstream news for a few days and see for yourself, really. They may not outright lie that much, but they constantly lie by omission - all of them. And when they are called out, it's like screaming into the void since they just ignore it and carry on their merry way. Hence, very little if any accountability, and usually because the people that rely on these sources aren't the ones calling them out, and so refuse to believe they were lied to since it challenges what they think they know.
The book is the repulsive but popular "case study" format where various historical examples are considered
One example he cites is of course news organisations that publish factual information intended to be relied upon for, e.g., betting on sports or investing
CNBC gets a few paragraphs
In that situation, do the news organisations have an obligation to publish accurate facts
There is nothing in the book that considers whether prediction markets are journalism
But it does describe how news organisations employing journalists have historically published information use by the public in arriving at predictions
No accountability in their doublespeak means no partisan interest, no lobby prescribing how to spin the news. This is what they (and the downvoters here) don't like.
Most of the top level comments support scrapping the deal, most of them on the basis that "sports gambling is a cancer." A cancer for whom? I want to take the opposite position: let people do whatever they want, as long as they bear the consequences of their decisions instead of socializing the risk. You don't like betting or gambling? Great, then don't do it. But forcing your preferences on others is not the way.
Sports betting has externalities that are hard to push back into the original bettor and the bookie. Solving those externalities involves regulation in some form, whether by regulation or heavy taxes.
A great irony here is that Kalshi and media generally are competitors. When I make important decisions (e.g. understanding politics, where to travel and setup companies), I always value betting markets over hearsay (aka media). The former has real money at stake, whereas the latter often has no skin in the game (as well as a other issues; like herd mentality, sensationalism, incentive to tell people what they want to hear rather than what's true).
They are partisan. It's just whoever decides to make the bets. Like the 2022 election situation was just one big whale. There's just nothing about it that makes it inherently non-partisan.
A partisan bet makes the opposite position slightly more profitable, attracting bets which equilibrate the market back at fair prices (i.e. realistic probabilities)
A whale just means the market gets more mis-priced, creating greater incentive for correction, which typically occurs.
Let's for a moment say you're right, and prediction markets do have a flaw (that if someone wants to spend a lot of money making an outcome look more/less likely), that's an imperfection vs the many biases in other information sources.
tl;dr prediction markets financially penalise providing misleading information, whereas traditional media profit from misleading information
>They are not the ones who has to bear the financial responsibilities of the company.
When the company does poorly, who ends up hurting more? Is it the workers that get laid off, the executives that get another bonus, or the owner that remains a billionaire?
The company loses $, not workers. Workers get paid regardless whether the company loses money or not.
Union workers rarely ever get fired over this especially.
Last year, the federal org i belong to laid off 20% of our workforce. The difference in personnel is noticeable, especially when the kpi's are trying to keep up with this year's targets. Next year, we are expecting more people to 'leave'.
I hate prediction markets but simultaneously find this a little rich.
I think most people have experienced what Michael Chrichton called Gel Mann Amnesia - the idea that newspapers feel accurate except about topics you know about.
Whenever I read about topics I know about: such as my employer, a political topic I am particular familiar with, etc - the reporting is usually off in what MC called a "wet streets cause rain" kind of way.
I haven't seen any accountability for this kind of reporting. If a newspaper wrote that someone was born in 1980 but it was actually 1985 they may correct that but the broader theme of articles being inherently misleading to reality is rampant and I suspect significantly worse than when MC conceptualized this problem.
That's to say I am not sure there's a practical standard to which a random times writer is held that kalshi isn't to. If anything I think kalshi is more clearly presented as "a bet" vs "the truth" so I don't understand the meat of the grievance.
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[ 50.4 ms ] story [ 598 ms ] threadIn some grim way it will be interesting to see the how this evolves. I mean, in a way betting markets are parasitic on news agencies that have a reputation for objective reporting, in the sense that they need something that can be treated as objective to evaluate their bets. How will it shake out if reporting institutions become “part of the game.” If “editor at NYT” or “knows and editor at NYT” become an advantages that can be leveraged (either for advanced outcomes or to manipulate outcomes themselves).
Maybe the betting groups will eventually need to built institutions that are known for objective/prudent reporting that can be accessed equally, haha.
> Kalshi handed him equity worth roughly $300,000 when he joined as a strategic adviser in early 2025. ... Kalshi granted him the stake when the company was valued at under $2 billion — less than a tenth of its $22 billion valuation in a funding round last month ...
Um, how does a $300K stake at an "under $2 billion" valuation become "worth billions" with a 10-50x valuation increase?
(Disclaimer: I'm not defending the Trump family in any way, the administration has been absurdly and blatantly corrupt.)
He got it for being an advisor. I assume you have similar questions about hunter biden and the gas company?
Donald Trump is burning down the country for his and his family’s wealth.
You don’t have to support either
The question answers itself.
Answered your own question.
Trump Jr. just pumped 300 million into Polymarket and also has a stake in Kalshi so, i'm not sure who thinks the DOJ will really do anything. this is fentanyl on the phone but there will have to be a few examples like some low-levels House members or state senators alongside sports casualites
To me, the rules on how large a media conglomerate could get being changed in favor of allowing the conglomerate to grow even larger did some heavy lifting. Journalism publishers no longer have to compete since their all owned by the same limited number of owners.
Because the US Supreme Court said the federal law preventing it was illegal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy_v._National_Collegiate_...
It was banned federally in 1992 by an act of Congress (with bipartisan consensus).
Not exactly. The law was weird, and that's why it was overturned. It didn't make sports betting illegal federally, instead it prevented states from "authorizing" it, which the petitioners argued was an unconstitutional intrusion into the lawmaking ability of states in that it prevented them from repealing laws against sports betting that they had previously passed.
The full ruling is at https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/16-476_dbfi.pdf, and the last paragraph sums it up: "Congress can regulate sports gambling directly, but if it elects not to do so, each State is free to act on its own".
The SCOTUS ruling didn't legalize sports betting; states chose to do that themselves once they were no longer prevented from doing so. Congress could ban it nationwide today, and probably they should.
Modern gambling isn't you talking to a bookie and putting down $100 on your favorite team. That should still be legal. Phone apps which learn your behavior, your favorite teams, the offers you are likely to accept, the time of day that you're most likely to make a bet, etc etc and use that to barrage you with notifications, "free" plays, high paying parlays with horrible odds, should not be.
Society bears the downsides of gambling and gambling addiction, while the casinos gather all of the upside.
Finally... https://www.thalamos.co.uk/resources/gambling-addiction-rela...
> NHS gambling clinics have experienced a rise of 130% in referrals in a year, leading to a large increase in the number of support locations.
Seems like the UK is also experiencing a large increase in problems from modern gambling systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_gambling_in_the_Uni...
But i think one of the prediction markets more important uses is to enable insider trading for the current administration.
All of the above is completely independent from what Congress can or cannot do.
The problem with the stock market is when there aren't enough new companies going public to soak up the spigot of all the capital that people want to invest, leading average P/E ratios to increase over time. There is too much money chasing too few earnings. When the underlying fundamentals don't match up, then all that investors are doing is speculating that someone else will be the bigger fool and buy from them at an even more unreasonable price - and that is a gamble.
> A partnership between The Times (for The Athletic) and Kalshi would also provide validation that their prediction market data should be taken seriously as an indicator of the future. Facts prove otherwise.
They could have objected to the partnership on any number of valid grounds, like the fact that predicting the outcome of sporting events provides no valid benefit and can only ever be gambling, or that the integration is probably going to be pretty lame and provide no benefit to the reader.
Instead, they felt compelled to make a trivially false claim, the claim that prediction markets do not accurately predict the future. It's trivial to prove that this claim is false, because if it were true, it would be very easy for anyone to make a huge amount of money on prediction markets.
It's even more telling why they made this claim, to avoid "providing validation". Not because of any harms caused by sports gambling addiction, but because it could provide a tiny piece of political ammunition to a product that has been slotted into the opposing political tribe. Reading this statement, one gets the impression that they would be completely OK with sports gambling on The Athletic, as long as it was provided by a more traditional casino-style bookie operation.
I'm guessing that anyone in the room when this statement was written who even brought up the question of the facts could be safely sidelined and ostracized by the union as being insufficiently loyal to their political position.
Even taking your nitpick a little bit seriously, behold:
> Retail prediction market traders pick winners 51.3% of the time yet lose money; automated traders achieve coin-flip accuracy yet earn $133 million.
The entire enterprise exists to move money from gamblers to companies. The externalities (suicide, social degradation) of this transaction is bourne by society.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/23/hairdryer-or-l...
On another note, I had no idea the athletic was owned by NY Times.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sox_Scandal
It's always corrosive to society in a way other vices really aren't. Money is a massive influence and incentive, and in gambling you can artificially increase the possible incentive size with long shot bets.
The best part of how gambling makes everything shit is that gambling addicts will ruin the sanctity of everything that claims authenticity for just a few actual dollars of "profit", after you ignore all the money they've lost by betting, which addicts tend to do.
Assholes who insist betting on things are the best and totally great for the world somehow will harm a sports event that ten thousand people have paid a hundred dollars to enjoy just to earn a hundred bucks themselves.
> found a pattern of [Polymarket] sharing false and misleading information
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/20/technology/polymarket-soc...
They don't have much to say about Kalshi other than "unlike real mainstream journalism, there’s no accountability". Which isn't saying much, because nobody is claiming prediction markets are a type of journalism.
Claiming that something is a better way to learn about the world is NOT the same as claiming it is using a specific method, or part of a specific tradition.
I’m open to being convinced, but if you’re claiming mainstream media has no accountability, I think you need to substantiate that.
I realize there are information bubbles on the internet where this is accepted as truth, but unexamined. Nonsense is everywhere on the internet. I’d be curious how you’d substantiate this.
I read mainstream news, but I don't know what you're referring to.
It's not like they are perfect, but I do see accountability when they screw up.
James Surowiecki wrote an entire book essentially saying otherwise.
https://media.netflix.com/en/only-on-netflix/82772143
The book is the repulsive but popular "case study" format where various historical examples are considered
One example he cites is of course news organisations that publish factual information intended to be relied upon for, e.g., betting on sports or investing
CNBC gets a few paragraphs
In that situation, do the news organisations have an obligation to publish accurate facts
There is nothing in the book that considers whether prediction markets are journalism
But it does describe how news organisations employing journalists have historically published information use by the public in arriving at predictions
"Paxton didn’t sign on to attempts to regulate Kalshi after the prediction market platform and its CEO donated to him and his PAC."
Let's for a moment say you're right, and prediction markets do have a flaw (that if someone wants to spend a lot of money making an outcome look more/less likely), that's an imperfection vs the many biases in other information sources.
tl;dr prediction markets financially penalise providing misleading information, whereas traditional media profit from misleading information
Unions are for improving worker conditions such as getting the right pay, and right working environment.
They want to "run" the company themselves. Some might argue they are for keeping their current working env without Kalshi.
They are not the ones who has to bear the financial responsibilities of the company. They can shove it and just move on.
When the company does poorly, who ends up hurting more? Is it the workers that get laid off, the executives that get another bonus, or the owner that remains a billionaire?
https://bsky.app/profile/beanytuesday.bsky.social/post/3mllq...
I think most people have experienced what Michael Chrichton called Gel Mann Amnesia - the idea that newspapers feel accurate except about topics you know about.
Whenever I read about topics I know about: such as my employer, a political topic I am particular familiar with, etc - the reporting is usually off in what MC called a "wet streets cause rain" kind of way.
I haven't seen any accountability for this kind of reporting. If a newspaper wrote that someone was born in 1980 but it was actually 1985 they may correct that but the broader theme of articles being inherently misleading to reality is rampant and I suspect significantly worse than when MC conceptualized this problem.
That's to say I am not sure there's a practical standard to which a random times writer is held that kalshi isn't to. If anything I think kalshi is more clearly presented as "a bet" vs "the truth" so I don't understand the meat of the grievance.