Betting on the news raises ethical questions for journalists | The Verge

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Betting on the news raises ethical questions for journalists

Newsrooms are cutting deals with prediction market platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket while banning staff from using them.

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Prediction market exchanges have created an environment where just about any piece of information is potentially monetizable: How well will BTS’s new song perform this week? How hot will Los Angeles get? Will Donald Trump be impeached? Users can wager on all of that and, on some platforms, more gruesome and violent outcomes in the real world.

The rapid rise and expansion of Polymarket and Kalshi have put newsrooms in a strange position. Prediction market evangelists often claim that their odds are more trustworthy and accurate than polls and traditional media — effectively positioning the industry as a replacement for news. At the same time, news organizations from Fox News to The Associated Press are cutting deals with prediction market exchanges, and Polymarket and Kalshi are attempting to align with independent journalists and Substackers through paid placement deals.

Because prediction markets allow users to monetize news, journalists are caught in the crosshairs: what they report (and the information that goes into reporting) suddenly has a dollar amount attached to it. It also means that the information they encounter on the job is potentially very valuable. Earlier this week Pro Publica announced it was updating its code of ethics to explicitly mention restrictions on how staff use prediction markets. Pro Publica’s code of ethics already has restrictions on how staff can invest in outside companies they cover. But the policy now states that “no employee should wager on the outcome of news events on the prediction markets — regardless of whether or not they are involved in coverage of said event.”

Diego Sorbara, assistant managing editor at Pro Publica, said the outlet began discussing the issue after reports that some Polymarket users had made hundreds of thousands of dollars betting on military action in Iran. (Also a concern: the case of the Times of Israel reporter who was threatened by bettors who demanded he update his story to align with their wagers.)

“If you are covering, let’s say, a war in Iran, you also shouldn’t be taking monetary stakes in it so that you’re somehow enriching yourself off the news events,” Sorbara says. “Just as you wouldn’t buy stocks, I think we felt that this was almost a natural progression.” Sorbara says the policy applies not just to editorial staff like reporters and editors but to staff on the business side as well, given that everyone is privy to what stories are in the works.

Pro Publica’s policy allows for some gambling: an office Oscars ballot, for example, or sports betting, where legal. Sorbara reasons that because the outlet doesn’t really cover sporting event outcomes, sports gambling didn’t pose much of a concern. The exception would be if a reporter was working on something like a story about the NFL or another sports league, at which point tighter restrictions might kick in. A reporter who worked on a 2021 story about NBA owners avoiding taxes, for example, would have been barred from betting on basketball games.

The bulk of trading volume on Kalshi is on sports, but prediction markets complicate what is a “news event” and what isn’t. I asked Sorbara whether a Pro Publica employee would be allowed to wager on peripheral markets related to the Super Bowl — who will be in the crowd, or who will perform.

“‘Will someone perform at an event’ could be informed by thousands of different calculations. It could be [that] there’s an ideological issue: ‘I’m not going to perform at this event because this organization supports X,’ or ‘This league has taken Y positions in the past,’” Sorbara says. “All of a sudden that starts smelling like a news story to me. If someone [on staff] asked me, I would tell them to not [bet on] that.”

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The concerns are not just about avoiding conflicts of interest — news reported by journalists moves odds on prediction markets, and in some cases, coverage itself becomes an opportunity to bet. On Polymarket, more than $55 million of trading volume went into the question of who would be named Time’s 2025 Person of the Year, a selection made by the magazine’s editors.

“TIME’s existing policy prohibits employees and members of their households from participating in prediction markets or similar activities that speculate on non-public information gained through their employment at TIME,” spokesperson Kristin Matzen told The Verge in an email. “This policy also restricts all employees and members of their household from any prediction market activity based on TIME announcements.”

Some news outlets see their existing rules around conflicts of interest as covering activity on prediction markets. The Verge’s ethics statement states: “We do not allow reporters to cover people or companies where they have a personal conflict.”

“Right now my read is that the current ethics policy prevents conflicts of interest, which cover gambling on news,” The Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel says. “But if we need to write a tighter policy specifically for prediction markets we’ll keep an eye on things and do that without hesitation.”

Insider trading is illegal, but it happening on prediction markets is taken almost as a given

Similarly, Charlie Stadtlander, executive director of media relations and communications for The New York Times, pointed me to its existing ethics policy that prohibits staff from making “any form of investment” in “a company, enterprise or industry that figures or is likely to figure in coverage” that they handle, including derivatives, futures, short selling, and speculative debt (Kalshi and Polymarket’s small US platform is regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission).

Insider trading is illegal, but it happening on prediction markets is taken almost as a given — including by sponsored influencer content hyping the platforms up. The argument that prediction markets surface what will happen in the future even before an event occurs depends, to an extent, on there being insiders on the platforms making trades on information that isn’t yet public. Journalists regularly have access to non-public information — upcoming news under embargo, off-the-record details from sources, or news that has not yet been published. If you threw ethics out the window and didn’t fear losing your job, a journalist would make a perfect insider. Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan has said it’s “cool” that his company creates an environment where insiders divulge the information they hold. The problem is that, again, insider trading is supposed to be illegal, and the actual insiders — like journalists, or poll workers in Pennsylvania — are in theory not allowed to trade on relevant prediction markets. Without insiders, what competitive edge do prediction market odds provide?

Fake or real, the “inside traders” on Polymarket are great engagement bait

Prediction markets are trying to lure journalists with partnership deals

Oh, you think the government will regulate Kalshi and Polymarket? Wanna bet?

Even as staff at media outlets are banned from trading on prediction markets, newsroom after newsroom has announced licensing or advertising deals with these same platforms (not to mention partnerships between MLB and Polymarket, or FIFA’s deal with a little-known platform). Do these outlets consider their responsibility any differently?

CNN, which has a partnership with Kalshi, prohibits its employees from betting on prediction markets and includes disclosures on stories about the industry, spokesperson Anna Jager said in an email.

“Prediction markets offer just one source of data that journalists can use in telling a story,” Jager said. “It is used as a complement to other reporting and data sources, such as polling. It is not a replacement for other sources and has no impact on editorial independence.”

Dow Jones, which publishes The Wall Street Journal, entered into a data partnership with Polymarket in January. Spokesperson Lauren Mc Cabe told The Verge via email that the company has issued guidance that all employees are prohibited from using confidential work information to trade, and “must avoid any prediction market activities that could create a conflict of interest” with their work. News employees — as well as members of their household — are also barred from betting on prediction markets related to their coverage area.

Through deals with legacy news outlets and prominent placement on everything from sports broadcasts to award shows, prediction markets are working to legitimize themselves into institutional adoption. Sorbara says he finds the media deals “strange,” even if they are something like behind-the-scenes data licensing agreements.

“[The] optics are not particularly great to me,” he says. “I think as journalists, we just have this duty to be as fair-minded as we can be, and to even avoid the appearance that something shady is going on, because we’re the ones who are supposed to be the truth tellers out here. And if people can’t trust us, then we’ve got very little left.”

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