Mainstream media has jumped the shark, but, unfortunately for truth, justice, and the American way, they didn’t stick the landing. The sharks are feasting. Ida Tarbell, Dorothy Thompson, and Walter Cronkite couldn’t have seen this coming.

Late last year Kalshi, a New York City-based financial exchange and prediction market company that offers gambling via event contracts, became CNN’s official prediction markets partner.

The company’s announcement of the deal noted “Users can trade [translation: bet] on real-world events to predict the outcomes of elections, weather, cultural moments, and more.”

I wonder if the partnership will take bets on when the climate crisis makes the world uninhabitable for humans?

In the face of this global emergency, the rise of fascism, growing inequality, and the demolition of the U.S. health care system, CNN goes all in on gambling. CNBC is also rolling the dice on what Judd Legum called the “casino-fication of news.”

Legum noted Kalshi allows the public to place bets on a “dizzying variety of news events.” He wrote in December that there are currently Kalshi markets for the winner of the 2028 presidential election, next month’s unemployment rate, and next week’s top TV show on Netflix.

Legum reported that after Kalshi won a lawsuit against the Commodity Futures Trading Commission that allowed it to take bets on the 2024 presidential election, the platform exploded in popularity. Trading volume was expected to exceed $50 billion in 2025, up from $300 million in 2024.

These gambling partnerships with CNN, CNBC, and the other corporate vultures sure to follow will further erode the way the news is reported and consumed. It’s now part of the growing U.S. business landscape that speculates on future events for financial gain, as gambling becomes an unhealthy economic addition.

It’s a loser’s hand, but our corporate overlords are all in.

News is being repackaged as entertainment by CEOs more interested in pocketing a quick buck while normalizing authoritarianism. The journalism profession, however, is supposed to be about making the populace aware of and informed about current events. It’s not meant to be a distraction from reality.

Corporate media, especially of the cable variety, is nothing more than talking heads screaming over each other and a game show-like presentation of what is happening in the world. The corrupted industry is being taken over by oligarchs who are hell-bent on maintaining the status quo, or, worse, making life more dangerous for us but financially better for them.

Kalshi’s CEO seems to think his company and gambling are the pillars of society.

“Kalshi is replacing debate, subjectivity, and talk with markets, accuracy, and truth,” Tarek Mansour is quoted in an early December press release. “We have created a new way of consuming and engaging with information. It’s hard to have an opinion about the future today without thinking about Kalshi.”

I know I have an opinion about Kalshi, and I usually think about its contributions to society when I’m on the toilet.

The Fourth Estate long played a vital — and imperfect — role in our desire to be a free and open society until a hated-filled troll emigrated from Australia to the United States in the 1970s to patiently create a racist/fascist empire of fake news that has mangled the face of journalism. CBS recently joined the growing ranks of state propaganda.

The profession has steadily been weakened by corporations and venture capitalists who invest in propaganda and hire liars, racists, and sexual predators to help get liars, racists, and sexual predators elected. News gathering has devolved into “reporting” on social media posts and using artificial intelligence — I’m not talking about Jesse Watters. Facts and truth have been replaced by whataboutism and both-siding the climate crisis and fascism.

Kalshi and its rival Polymarket seem to believe betting lines somehow provide accuracy and truth. One of its egotistical CEOs even thinks gambling can replace debate. Governance by Las Vegas bookmakers — only slightly less odious than what we have now.

In announcing its deal with CNBC, Mansour said the partnership is “the next evolution: moving from data about what’s happening now, to real-time forecasts about what’s happening next.” They actually think they can predict the future because the money line favors Palestinian starvation.

Woodward and Bernstein didn’t need a gambling app to break Watergate.

Most of Kalshi’s trades are related to sports — some 75%, according to a recent study. To expand its market and, thus, its profits, new betting props and gamblers are required.

So, as Legum wrote, Kalshi (as well as CNN and CNBC) decided to “trivialize even the most sobering events, framing tragedies as money-making opportunities.” He noted, for example, that Kalshi offered a market allowing people to bet on whether there would be a famine declared in Gaza.

Betting lines are at best for games. Politics, at least to the vast majority of us outside of it, isn’t a game. For many, it can mean life or death. The over/under on starvation isn’t something we should be betting on. It’s “Hunger Games”-like entertainment that any serious media organization wouldn’t partner with.

CNBC president KC Sullivan said “prediction markets are rapidly shaping how investors and business leaders think about important events.”

If that’s the case, we’re more screwed than I thought.

Frank Carini can be reached at [email protected]. His opinions don’t reflect those of ecoRI News.