The New Yorker:

CNN and CNBC have partnered with Kalshi, a prediction market, encouraging their viewers to wager on current events in real time.

By Danny Funt

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.

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