For years, ESPN wanted nothing to do with sports gambling. That stance had softened a bit as of 2018, when the Supreme Court struck down a federal ban on bookmaking, but the following year, Bob Iger, who was then the CEO of ESPN’s parent, Disney, told investors: “I don’t see the Walt Disney Company, certainly in the near term, getting involved in the business of gambling, in effect, by facilitating gambling in any way.”
So it came as a shock to many people, including Nicole Noren, a longtime ESPN producer, when ESPN licensed its name to a gambling app in 2023. By then, ESPN, like so many sports outlets, was promoting betting at virtually every opportunity; now it would encourage fans to use ESPN Bet. The app, which stood to generate a billion and a half dollars for the network over ten years, proved to be an embarrassing flop. But it was promptly replaced by a partnership with DraftKings, the sports gambling giant. These days, DraftKings ads blanket ESPN coverage, and this past March the companies enabled customers to link their ESPN and DraftKings accounts. It’s a partnership, a press release explained, “that goes beyond a traditional marketing arrangement, redefining how fans engage with sports.”
For Noren, ESPN Bet was the last straw. “I was out,” she told me. “I’m not going to work for a gambling company and have blood on my hands.” ESPN wasn’t an easy place to leave. Noren had worked there for twenty-four years, winning Emmy, Murrow, and Peabody awards, mainly for her work on Outside the Lines, the investigative newsmagazine. She was entrusted with some of the network’s most serious and sensitive reporting, involving topics such as gender-based violence, the mental health of college students, and concussions. With the NFL back in full swing—and ESPN preparing to carry its first-ever Super Bowl, in February—Noren spoke publicly for the first time about her own family’s experience with compulsive gambling. “Addiction dictated every part of our life,” she said. “It’s very, very personal to me.” Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
DF: At its best, what was it like working at ESPN?
NN: Having resources and latitude to do true, deep journalism was incredible. We were very insulated for many years and able to do pretty serious stories that sometimes involved business stakeholders. One great example was a story that Outside the Lines did in 2011 on Bobby Dodd, the former president of the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), after two men accused him of sexually abusing them when they were children and he was a YMCA basketball coach. At the time, the AAU headquarters were on Disney World property, at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex.
Was the wall between business and editorial always rock-solid?
About five to seven years ago, that wall started getting a little more penetrable. There was a change in leadership, and my colleagues on the investigative unit and I noticed more of a rocky path to report some stories that involved stakeholders.
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. 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.
What ultimately persuaded you to leave?
For so many years, there was a really strict line in the sand when it came to sports betting. Then the tide slowly began turning internally. 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.
My grandfather, my father, and one of my brothers were pretty much destroyed by sports gambling addiction. I grew up in Ventura, California, and multiple times, we suddenly had to move because of extreme financial ups and downs. I mean, I grew up in a sportsbook. We didn’t go to museums and typical places kids go to. 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.
When you shared those concerns with your boss and other leaders at ESPN, did they offer a defense?
No. It was almost like putting their heads in the sand. 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.
A few weeks after my last day, a former coworker sent me a link to ESPN’s website. They had posted an interactive gambling story—a primer on how to gamble on sports. I opened it and it literally made me sick to my stomach. The animations are bouncy and bright; it’s pretty much made for kids. And I know from working there how long something like this takes to make, how many people are involved, and I just said to myself, “How did no one in this entire process say, ‘What are we doing? This is wrong. We’re helping kids and young people figure out how to do something that could be incredibly detrimental to their health’?” It’s just so offensive to me that they would be so oblivious and caught up in the business side of it that they weren’t thinking about the public health side.
You mentioned that ESPN wasn’t keen on you investigating the risks that come with sports betting legalization. Do you suspect that other outlets are repressing reporting that might upset their gambling advertisers?
Absolutely. The only people who can really speak out on this right now are independent journalists. I empathize with people who work at large media companies. It’s really risky in this landscape to speak out. What inspires me is that there is a growing movement of sports journalists, namely in the podcast space, who are not taking gambling advertising money. There are also people who are willfully blind right now. They care more about their 401(k) than they care about journalism.
I’ve been working with a few partners to start a sports betting and gambling addiction content initiative. 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.
Recently, ESPN.com published a moving feature by Elizabeth Merrill and David Purdum about a college student who developed a horrible gambling addiction, an increasingly common issue on campuses. The student requested that gambling ads not appear alongside the article, and the reporters noted that many recovering addicts have a hard time watching sports because of the relentless gambling commercials. Do you think people at ESPN read that story and thought to look in the mirror?
Liz is a friend, and I really respect her. The big issue with this topic is what is not being said, and that’s the role that ESPN and other sports media companies are playing in contributing to this crisis.
What troubles me most is the disconnect at the ESPN executive level between making money and caring about the human impact of constantly bombarding fans with betting odds and talk. It’s become impossible to escape—during live games, studio shows, podcasts, etc. But just because there aren’t yet laws here banning some of this during live sports broadcasts—as there are in some other countries—doesn’t mean they should be doing it.
I try to give them the benefit of the doubt and think, wow, maybe they don’t have any direct experience with gambling addiction. But at some point, where are the people in the room saying, “Just because we can do this, should we?”