Craig Carton almost had his life completely ruined when he was convicted of fraud in 2019 due to a severe gambling addiction. Luckily for him, when he got out of prison, he was still able to return to sports broadcasting.
After his prison release in 2020, he hosted a weekly program called Hello, My Name Is Craig, on which he would discuss problem gambling. In 2021, Craig Carton became a responsible gambling ambassador for a sports betting platform, and he currently serves as a recovery advocate.
So gambling is a very personal issue with him. Which is why he recently went after ESPN for what he believes is gambling marketing directed at children.
To educate potential gamblers about point spreads, moneylines, parlays, and other gambling terms, ESPN recently released a basic betting guide. However, Carton believes the betting guide is actually intended for children because it is a cartoon.
“ESPN is, next to the Trump Organization, probably the only organization in the history of mankind to be unsuccessful by running a gambling company,” Craig Carton said, then added, “So then they decided, ‘Oh, I know what we’ll do. Since we suck at gambling and owning a gambling company ourselves, we’ll just partner with one of the two big dogs.’
“So they’re desperate. So when you’re desperate and you don’t care about the viewing public that supports all your programming, you do a deal with the devil. That’s exactly what ESPN just unleashed on the American public within the last 24 hours, and that is create a betting guide for the American public in the form of a cartoon.”
Craig Carton questions why a betting guide for adults was made like a cartoon
“Now, if you’re a 35-year-old man that has never gambled before, but because you see all the ads and you’re a big sports fan and you’re like, ‘You know what, I can afford a couple hundred bucks this month to wager on the outcome of sporting events, I’m going to go do that.’ Would you be convinced to do it by seeing a cartoon? The answer is obviously not.
“So then you have to ask yourself if you’re going to put out a betting guide and it’s a rudimentary, elementary betting guide where they literally teach you what does minus-7 mean? And they go about seven, eight, nine pages deep before they get to anything about the potential dangers of legalized wagering, especially the dangers for young kids that are too immature to understand the concept of money management, have no fiscal reality, have never earned a penny, and when they do gamble with their parents, they never have to pay when they lose,” Craig Carton continued.
“So ESPN decided, because they’re the devil, that the best way to increase market share and get bang for their buck is to appeal to the children in their audience, high school kids, junior high school kids, by creating a betting guide that is centered around a cartoon.”
Carton was unequivocal in his criticism of ESPN
“ESPN executives should have shut this down as soon as their creative team said, ‘Voila, we’ve got the answer,’ in their desperate attempt to get market share,” Cartonsaid. “In a desperate attempt to make more money on top of more money, ESPN has made the calculated decision that the quickest avenue and way to do that is not through adult sports fans. It’s through your children. And that’s just flat-out wrong.
“And I don’t care how they want to spin it. That’s who you’re trying to attract when you put out a gambling guide in the form of a cartoon.”
Carton’s criticism comes right after a former ESPN producer made similar claims
Last week, former ESPN producer Nicole Noren, who resigned after 24 years with the network, citing the company’s embrace of sports betting and concerns about gambling addiction’s devastating consequences, explained her reasoning for quitting.
Noren, who won Emmy, Murrow, and Peabody awards while with the network, publicly discussed her family’s experience with compulsive gambling and her brother’s death at age 36 after being introduced to it at a young age. She said that her father, grandfather, and her brother were all essentially “destroyed” by their addiction to sports betting.
“It was very troubling for me to see the normalization of betting and ESPN’s complete acceptance of that, and finally, they just decided to go all in. It worried me. I knew what gambling addiction could do to families,” Noren said.
She added that when ESPN licensed its name to a gambling app in 2023 and encouraged fans to use ESPN Bet, she “was out.”
“I’m not going to work for a gambling company and have blood on my hands,” she explained.
Noren also claimed ESPN executives didn’t care when she voiced her concerns.
“It was almost like putting their heads in the sand,” she said. “What bothered me most was a seeming disregard for the dangers and not thinking about the ramifications of ESPN normalizing gambling for an audience that looks to ESPN as sort of their sports guide, essentially—not looking down the road at the parallels between gambling and other addictive things in our country that have been normalized, such as opioids and cigarettes, that ended up becoming major public health crises.”