As anyone who watches sports is very well aware, gambling ads are unavoidable. Many people don’t have a problem with that, but some have taken issue with gambling being grafted into sports broadcasts themselves.
One of those people is former ESPN producer Nicole Noren, who resigned after 24 years with the network having won Emmy, Murrow, and Peabody awards while with the network, citing the company’s embrace of sports betting and concerns about gambling addiction’s devastating consequences.
Gambling addiction affected her very personally
It was personal to her. In an interview published this week by the Columbia Journalism Review, Nicole Noren 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.
“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 revealed.
She claims that addiction to sports betting virtually “destroyed” her father, grandfather, and one of her brothers. Noren stated that they were repeatedly forced to relocate due to extreme fluctuations in the family’s finances due to gambling.
“I mean, I grew up in a sportsbook. We didn’t go to museums and typical places kids go to,” she continued. “We were dragged to Las Vegas in the eighties and hanging out in the Hilton and Caesars sportsbooks, when kids weren’t supposed to be around there. I remember going to the horse track, going to the dog track.
“My brother died thirteen years ago on the sidewalk in downtown Las Vegas. It’s a stark reality, but it illustrates the tragic arc of being brought there as kids so our dad could gamble at sportsbooks, to then surviving on the streets there as a homeless person and dying at thirty-six.”
ESPN Bet was the beginning of the end for her time there
When ESPN licensed its name to a gambling app in 2023 and encouraged fans to use ESPN Bet, she couldn’t stand idly by.
“I was out,” Noren said. “I’m not going to work for a gambling company and have blood on my hands.”
She claims ESPN actively neutered her and her investigative team when it came to reporting stories about the negative consequences of gambling.
“What was telling to me was that I had pitched numerous stories that would take a harder look at some of the gambling companies and addiction, and none of those stories was greenlit,” she said. “They ended up doing a show on it around that time, but it became very neutered. Some of the people involved intended to make it much more hard-hitting and hold the gambling companies accountable. Let’s just say the final product didn’t end up doing that.”
When she spoke up about her concerns, she claims ESPN brass didn’t care
“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.”
The network said in a statement regarding Noren’s interview: “ESPN remains committed to journalism that serves sports fans, holds powerful interests accountable and earns our audience’s trust. Our editorial decisions are guided by news judgment and journalistic integrity, and we demonstrate this every day through the award-winning content we produce across our platforms.”
Noren reports that she has been collaborating with a few partners to launch an endeavor to create content about gambling addiction and sports betting.
“It’s a collaboration among journalists, content creators, and nonprofit health organizations to reach a young audience, rooted in public health, with the goal of spurring more national conversation and action to combat the growing crisis,” she said.