Leading up to the NBA Draft, basketball insider Shams Charania became a story himself when he falsely reported that guard Sterling “Scoot” Henderson was gaining momentum to be selected second-overall by the Charlotte Hornets. When the tweet was released to the public domain, the betting lines at various sportsbooks changed, as forward Brandon Miller was originally the favorite at -650 odds.
One sportsbook saw the line move to -900 for Henderson to be selected with the second pick, and Miller moved to a +480, a considerable movement affecting final outcomes. When Miller was ultimately chosen with the pick, speculation commenced regarding Charania’s role in the ostensibly erroneous report.
Charania is a FanDuel partner and contributes to programming on FanDuel TV while writing for The Athletic and working with Stadium. He has been making connections in the basketball landscape for many years and made a name for himself through years of hard work and persistence. Today, the insider battle is often reduced to Charania against ESPN senior NBA insider Adrian Wojnarowski, former colleagues who worked together at The Vertical with Yahoo Sports. While most industry professionals do not believe there was any malpractice intended beyond Charania’s error, it does accentuate a discussion regarding conflicts of interest among reporters, some of whom contribute or work with sportsbooks.
“There was a time if you were a newsbreaker [where] some companies would require before you send that tweet out, you had to run that tweet by the newsdesk and then you could send it out because of the consequences,” Bomani Jones said on his podcast, The Right Time. “Basically, you’re putting out news – just because it’s not on their platform doesn’t mean their brand isn’t affected by this.”
Sports media has been rapidly consolidating its operations, especially since balance sheets were impacted because of the COVID-19 pandemic. While the insatiable demand for content continuous to sustain high levels, the entities producing that content – and the relations thereof – are rapidly becoming more intertwined.
“What we’ve seen in the last couple of years is an influx in the content game of sportsbook money,” Jones said. “What the sportsbooks are doing is putting their branding onto content that they then produce. The sportsbooks are hoping that this content then encourages people to gamble. They put their imprint on a lot of different types of content.”
Jones’ program has run advertisements for sportsbooks before, but does not have a presenting sponsor in the space. Conversely, other programs, including The Pat McAfee Show for some time, have operations like FanDuel, DraftKings, BetMGM and Caesars Sportsbook prominently displayed and mentioned several times per day.
Additionally, sportsbooks are reducing the amount of outsourcing they engage in when it comes to content production, and there is inherent value in reliable, trustworthy information among consumers. The qualities of being informative and providing entertainment empower these entities to cut through the noise and stand out in the saturated media ecosystem.
“When we start talking about the consequences of gambling and we talk about what it does for players and how it affects the integrity of the game and everything else, the truth is a lot of the integrity of the game comes from outside of it,” Jones explained. “A lot of it is conferred upon by the media, and for the media to do that, the media itself has to be trustworthy.”
A conflict of interest, Jones surmised, has to do with the perception and how it affects the business more so than the bonafide conflict itself. The entire situation has the vacillating potential to help and/or hinder sports media; namely, the revenue stream as compared to maintaining credibility.
Gambling used to be an illicit practice outside of the state of Nevada, but now that it has become a regulatory power of the states after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association (2018), participation is considerably more facile. Jones has begun to examine whether or not the industry was better off before the rapid growth of the sportsbooks and if the revenue stream will be viable down the road.
“Now that you make it a little easy and call it legal, now we start getting into ethical quandaries as opposed to, ‘Ay homie, you was just breaking the law,’” Jones said. “Once you get into ethical quandaries, we’re having all kinds of subtle and nuanced discussions, and I don’t know how long you’ve been paying attention to sports baby, but that ain’t what we do well.”
