Consistent with the United States’ continued slide into an economy powered almost entirely by LLM slop, financialization, and ever-pervasive exploitative gambling, “prediction market app” Kalshi “entered into an official partnership” with CNN this week to bring their “data to CNN’s journalism across its television, digital and social channels.” Soon, CNN will run live odds on world events where its viewers can gamble on them in real time on their smartphones. The “data” (see: betting markets) will, according to Axios, “be featured on CNN’s air through a real-time data ticker and can be referenced across CNN’s platforms when journalists discuss news predictions. The partnership will include prediction market content related to politics, news, culture and weather. The integration will be championed by CNN chief data analyst Harry Enten, who will tap into real-time insights from Kalshi in his reporting on air, both via linear TV and CNN’s new streaming subscription service.”
The day after this story broke, Wall Street news network CNBC announced a similar “exclusive partnership” with Kalshi, marking a grim turn for TV news. “Starting in 2026, CNBC will incorporate exclusive Kalshi predictions market data [see: betting props] into its programs,” the press release read. What are these events that viewers will be able to bet on? Some are seemingly harmless enough: who will win an upcoming election, the weather in Chicago, the federal government’s jobs numbers, or what will be said on Kroger’s next earnings call. But many offerings are on life and death issues that will, as a matter of course, reduce these issues to just another chip on a roulette table for Western audiences increasingly isolated from the violence and suffering their governments inflict on the global south. Take, for example, one recent Kalshi betting market that allowed people to bet on whether Palestinians in Gaza would suffer mass starvation.
“Will the IPC classify Gaza as experiencing famine this year?” read the wager from this past summer. The bet was eventually settled in the affirmative after the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) did indeed declare famine in Gaza on Aug. 22. The more overtly cynical Polymarket, a rival of Kalshi that’s backed by right-wing multibillionaire Peter Thiel, allows for even more obscene wagering, permitting users to bet on whether Palestinians will be ethnically cleansed. “Gaza mass population relocation in 2025?” reads one of its many Gaza-related betting markets. You can also bet on when Israel will bomb Gaza, bomb the West Bank, or annex either.
One cannot, of course, wager on when or if Hamas will attack Israel since, in polite circles, Israelis are considered fully human and Palestinians are not.
Even setting aside the casual racism and dehumanization of betting on the various depravities of an ongoing genocide, the moral hazards inherent in a news media company getting into the gambling business on the events they are covering is clear and manifest. Obviously, reporters, pundits and anchors cannot determine world events, but they very much can determine the perception of world events, and can certainly do so enough to significantly move markets. Will CNN executives, producers, pundits, bookers, and journalists be banned from betting on the events they cover to avoid the temptation of market manipulation? Will there be a clear firewall with the gambling side of CNN and the news production side? Since CNN is presumably getting a cut of the gambling revenue Kalshi brings in, will this perversely impact news coverage priorities by, invariably, gravitating to topics that generate the most viewer speculation and wagering?
None of the CNN or Kalshi press releases addressed any of these glaring ethical issues. Nor, it’s worth highlighting, are those backing these betting markets separate from the human immiseration being wagered on. Kalshi’s two biggest investors, Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, are also heavily invested in the very same Israeli military whose genocide is serving as a popular forum for gambling markets. The most visible partner at Sequoia Capital, Shaun Maguire, is an outspoken supporter of Israel’s genocide, an open racist, and frequently discusses the need for using tech to promote Israeli propaganda. “The future of information warfare is AI,” Maguire said at the International DefenseTech Summit in Tel Aviv earlier this week. “If Israel doesn’t build its own [information war] engines, defensive and offensive, it will be outmaneuvered in a war it can’t see but is already in.”
To what extent will these betting markets help fuel said “information warfare”? How much will betting market manipulation, once integrated into the news, become its own power-serving self-fulfilling prophecy? In February 2025, New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani was given a 8% chance to win the election by Kalshi. If, at the time, CNN made this fact central in its coverage, how much would it have influenced voters’ perceptions of the race? How would it have impacted momentum? Polling has long served this conservative argument-by-tautology function, but the full embrace of betting markets — with their supposed air of predictive power — will now supercharge this already perverse, anti-democratic and anti-intellectual dynamic.
The Trump family — which has increased its fortune by $1.8 billion since his election, mostly through open corruption in crypto — is, of course, in on the action, with Donald Trump Jr. being named a “strategic advisor” to Kalshi earlier this year, presumably for his brilliant mind and ability to gauge world events and not his access to insider information.
The whole enterprise is ripe with dehumanization, corruption, market manipulation, exploitation, and moral decay. What is the social utility of any of this? What value is being created? What disease is being cured? What air is being cleaned? What life is being improved by any of this? The moral pitch, when Kalshi and its backers bother to make one, is that it will somehow reveal underlying “truths” in our media and thus give news creators the ability to better focus on this supposed “truth.”
This justification is just another iteration of the age-old half-assed moral pretext given by all professional speculators who produce nothing of value — “market liquidity,” “more efficient markets,” etc., etc. — but it’s even more spurious in this case since the “truths” being wagered on are so easily subject to insider trading and manipulation. There are no greater “truths” uncovered by news betting markets, just an endless series of rent seeking, dehumanized speculation, and gamification of war, poverty, and disease. “The long-term vision,” Klashi co-founder Tarek Mansour recently told a panel at Future of Global Markets 2025 Conference, “is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.” Politics and political opinions not as the raw matter of civic virtue, or social progress, or increasing human welfare, but just another facet of our lives — like sports, education, sexual intimacy — well on its way to being financialized, fleeced, and sold back to us at five times the price.
Ultimately, CNN’s open embrace of institutional gambling on news events is an acknowledgment of something that’s been clear for a while: news is not something that’s to be uncovered, not a truth to be revealed in pursuit of justice or holding power to account, not something meant to edify or educate — but just more content, more slop, another entertainment product to pass the time and gawk at. But most important of all, it has to be devoid of moral or political content, it can never contain a clear call to action nor can it be part of any political project — unless, of course, it aligns with US geopolitical interests. The horrific things we are witnessing are not something we can do anything about beyond vaguely pulling a lever once every two years. It’s only something we can passively consume and witness — a dynamic that elements within news organizations like CNN have worked to push back against, but which this “partnership” has now effectively snuffed out. All that’s left will be aggregation and wagering, gawking and rubber-necking at images of suffering, death, and starvation. But don’t worry, you’re no longer just a passive consumer of the horror content, you’re a passive consumer with a new and exciting ersatz agency allowing you to wager and lose money on the world events for which — we are repeatedly told — you can do nothing to meaningfully influence.
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