A front-page Sunday New York Times article carries the online headline "Cigars, Booze, Money: How a Lobbying Blitz Made Sports Betting Ubiquitous." A sidebar summarizes "Key Findings from The Times' Investigation of Sports Betting."
The investigative journalist explanation that this is all the fault of business buying off politicians breaks down when you realize that people were betting on sports before it became legal, and also that the New York Times has also gotten deep into the business of promoting sports betting, with regular articles such as this one, in the sports section of the same paper that carries the investigation:
How Betting Lines Work
A quick primer for those who are not familiar with betting lines: Favorites are listed next to a negative number that represents how many points they must win by to cover the spread. Buccaneers -2.5, for example, means that Tampa Bay must beat the Seahawks by at least 3 points for its backers to win their bet. Gamblers can also bet on the total score, which is whether the teams' combined score in the game is over or under a preselected number of points.
Betting-market data is taken from Action Network's Public Betting data, and lines are taken from Unabated's real-time-odds tracker.
It's hard to tell whether it's the New York Times or the Daily Racing Form. The Times print sports section stopped printing the baseball standings and batting averages and started publishing betting lines instead. Were the New York Times editors and executives who decided to do this also just swept off their feet by lobbyists offering "cigars, booze, and money"? Maybe what the Times is against is not sports gambling but capitalism, or profitable businesses advocating for their interests with government? The whole investigation, breathlessly presented, seems off, or at least hypocritical, in light of the Times' own sports betting coverage.