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The Media Front: All the News That’s Fit to Predict

When watching SportsCenter, or a game, I occasionally start droning on to my son about Pete Rose.

That’s because my formative years of baseball fandom were shaped in part by the Pete Rose betting scandal and movies revisiting the Black Sox scandal. And despite gambling now being baked into sports coverage, with leagues and media companies in business with sportsbooks, I’m still struck as betting lines flash across the screen. Or by the umpteenth ad for DraftKings.

I was thinking about how betting has swallowed sports media this week while reporting on prediction markets Polymarket and Kalshi becoming increasingly enmeshed in coverage of politics and world affairs, as people wager on, say, who’ll be the first to drop out of Donald Trump’s cabinet, among thousands of other potential questions.

And now, with CNN, CNBC and Dow Jones striking deals with prediction markets, I’d say the chances are high that Kalshi and Polymarket percentages pop up more and more in coverage.

The ever-shifting odds can be fascinating to watch from a news junkie’s perspective, but also disturbing when you consider the ramifications of topics being bet on, such as whether the president will invoke the Insurrection Act. That drastic step would surely only inflame an already chaotic situation, as masked agents seem to be running wild through Minneapolis.

We’re in the early stages of how prediction markets will impact our understanding of politics and culture, with Polymarket’s placement during the Golden Globes broadcast likely just the beginning of such tie-ins. As for journalism, Vox’s Astead Herndon had an insightful take this week on X.

“One impact of everything turning into a prediction market is the loss of curiosity. Especially in media and among journalists,” he wrote. “All everyone does now is guess what’s gonna happen. It’s so boring. To ask why is much harder/more rare/more valuable.”

Let’s keep asking why.

Michael Calderone
Media Editor
michael.calderone@thewrap.com

What are the odds?

The stunning U.S. strike on Venezuela and the capture of President Nicolás Maduro earlier this month was a momentous event, and for one mysterious Polymarket trader, a very lucrative one.

Someone bet on Maduro’s ouster just hours before the military operation on Polymarket, the wildly popular bet-on-everything tool, taking home more than $400,000 and raising suspicions about their identity. “It’s more likely than not that this was an insider,” one expert told the Wall Street Journal.

Four days after Maduro’s capture, Dow Jones, the parent company of the Wall Street Journal, announced it was forming an exclusive partnership with Polymarket to bring its real-time data across Dow Jones consumer platforms, a sign of how prediction markets are increasingly becoming enmeshed in news coverage — both as a source and a subject.

First Amendment fight

When news broke on Wednesday that the FBI had searched Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson’s home, there was a “constellation of reactions” inside the paper’s newsroom, according to one staffer.

Some Post employees were nervous, others angry. But the majority, the staffer said, had “questions about what are the practices that we all need to adopt in a world where the Trump administration can come take our computers.”

In conversations with TheWrap, Post journalists and First Amendment experts expressed alarm over the government taking the extremely rare step of executing a search warrant at a reporter’s home, a sign the Trump administration will bypass traditional ways of dealing with reporters in leak investigations and potentially stifle legitimate newsgathering.

All Eyes on CBS

The Bari Weiss era at CBS News continues to take shape, as Corbin Bolies broke the news that the standards department changed its editorial guidance in covering transgender athletes, and urged staff to use the term “biological sex at birth” without quotations.

Bolies also revealed fresh details of an internal dispute in November over the issue.

The guidance from Tom Burke, the network’s senior director of standards and practices, prompted a response from Jan Crawford, the network’s chief legal correspondent. Crawford said she was “setting aside the question of whether we as a news organization should be adopting TJA style” and said the U.S. court system, including the Supreme Court, still used the term.

“We have had this discussion multiple times before, and I continue to believe we should refrain from adopting terminology advocated by the movement and continue to use ‘biological sex’ without putting it in quotes,” she wrote.

Nicole Cutrona, a producer for “CBS Evening News” who previously referred to the “biological sex” phrase as a “transphobic dog whistle,” acknowledged to Crawford the network had had repeated conversations on the use of the phrase.

“I continue to believe our continued use of the term ‘biological sex’ illustrates our organization’s ignorance about topics involving sex and gender,” she wrote.

Bolies’ full piece is here:

Meanwhile, our Loree Seitz posed this provocative question, Is Tony Dokoupil’s “CBS Evening News” Overhaul Worth the Trouble?

California Post gearing up

Corbin Bolies writes:

On a sunny, 80-degree day last week, I strolled down a brownstone-lined New York street on my way to meet with California Post editor Nick Papps. Or rather, it was a model of a New York street on the Fox Studios lot in Los Angeles, near where the New York Post’s West Coast offshoot is busy grinding away ahead of its Jan. 26 launch date.

“We want to be disruptors. We want to challenge status quos. We want to shake things up,” Papps told me. “We want to put our readers first in digital and print, at all we do, and that, I think, is a pretty important motto — to make some noise.”

Check out my full interview with Papps later this week, where we discuss his plans for the California Post, how the paper will cover events like the Olympics and the Super Bowl and whether he’s spoken to President Trump.

Plus, the paper keeps hiring: Tatiana Siegel Leaves Variety for California Post’s Page Six at Launch