Odds and Ends

TV news is partnering with prediction markets. What does that mean for its disproportionately old viewership?

“Bingo,” Michael Durham said. “It’s here.” Durham, a seventy-two-year-old former salesman of, among other things, cable TV, who lives in Albuquerque, told me, “I can sit in my underwear and bet on whatever games I want till the cows come home.” We were speaking of online sports betting. “I’ve always had an interest in gambling, from the first time I went to a horse track when I was fourteen,” he said. “I just thought the whole deal was pretty cool and exciting. All my life I have been a bettor.” Durham connected this to a larger interest in predictions: “Who’s going to win this election? Is the temperature going to exceed a hundred degrees anywhere in the month of May in Los Angeles? There are a million propositions. I’m instinctively interested in those things, as I think a lot of people are.”

Durham first heard about the prediction markets Kalshi and Polymarket from following the news. But when we spoke, he didn’t yet know that Kalshi, which wants to “financialize everything,” now partners with CNN and CNBC, and has a “sponsored integration” with Fox News. Durham liked the idea of “making a wager of some sort on the outcome of a future event, whether it’s a ball game on TV tonight or a political election scheduled sixty days from now.” Even so, he worried about “war profiteering and death and destruction. That’s not cool.” He’d heard about Emanuel Fabian, the Israeli journalist who said he was being threatened by Polymarket bettors urging him to “update the lie” he published, a piece of news that had delivered them a loss. And he’d read about alleged signs of insider trading at Polymarket.