{"id":632950,"date":"2026-10-17T00:46:09","date_gmt":"2026-10-17T00:46:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/632950\/"},"modified":"2026-10-17T00:46:09","modified_gmt":"2026-10-17T00:46:09","slug":"espn-producer-quits-after-24-years-over-sports-gambling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/632950\/","title":{"rendered":"ESPN Producer Quits After 24 Years Over Sports Gambling"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"ESPN-studios\"iStockphoto<\/p>\n

As anyone who watches sports is very well aware, gambling ads are unavoidable. Many people don\u2019t have a problem with that, but some have taken issue with gambling being grafted into sports broadcasts themselves.<\/p>\n

One of those people is former ESPN<\/a> producer Nicole Noren, who resigned after 24 years with the network having won Emmy, Murrow, and Peabody awards while with the network, citing the company\u2019s embrace of sports betting and concerns about gambling<\/a> addiction\u2019s devastating consequences.<\/p>\n

Gambling addiction affected her very personally<\/p>\n

It was personal to her. In an interview published this week by the Columbia Journalism Review<\/a>, Nicole Noren publicly discussed her family\u2019s experience with compulsive gambling and her brother\u2019s death at age 36 after being introduced to it at a young age.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was very troubling for me to see the normalization of betting and ESPN\u2019s 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,\u201d Noren revealed.<\/p>\n

She claims that addiction to sports betting virtually \u201cdestroyed\u201d her father, grandfather, and one of her brothers. Noren stated that they were repeatedly forced to relocate due to extreme fluctuations in the family\u2019s finances due to gambling.<\/p>\n

\u201cI mean, I grew up in a sportsbook. We didn\u2019t go to museums and typical places kids go to,\u201d she continued. \u201cWe were dragged to Las Vegas in the eighties and hanging out in the Hilton and Caesars sportsbooks, when kids weren\u2019t supposed to be around there. I remember going to the horse track, going to the dog track.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cMy brother died thirteen years ago on the sidewalk in downtown Las Vegas<\/a>. It\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

ESPN Bet was the beginning of the end for her time there<\/p>\n

When ESPN licensed its name to a gambling app in 2023 and encouraged fans to use ESPN Bet, she couldn\u2019t stand idly by. <\/p>\n

\u201cI was out,\u201d Noren said. \u201cI\u2019m not going to work for a gambling company and have blood on my hands.\u201d<\/p>\n

She claims ESPN actively neutered her and her investigative team when it came to reporting stories about the negative consequences of gambling.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat 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,\u201d she said. \u201cThey 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\u2019s just say the final product didn\u2019t end up doing that.\u201d<\/p>\n

When she spoke up about her concerns, she claims ESPN brass didn\u2019t care<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was almost like putting their heads in the sand,\u201d she said. \u201cWhat 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\u2014not 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

The network said in a statement<\/a> regarding Noren\u2019s interview: \u201cESPN remains committed to journalism that serves sports fans, holds powerful interests accountable and earns our audience\u2019s trust. Our editorial decisions are guided by news judgment and journalistic integrity, and we demonstrate this every day through the award-winning content we produce across our platforms.\u201d<\/p>\n

Noren reports that she has been collaborating with a few partners to launch an endeavor to create content about gambling addiction and sports betting.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s 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,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"iStockphoto As anyone who watches sports is very well aware, gambling ads are unavoidable. Many people don\u2019t have…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":632951,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[12484,578,134,554,555,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-632950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mental-health","tag-espn","tag-gambling","tag-health","tag-mental-health","tag-mentalhealth","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/632950","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=632950"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/632950\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/632951"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=632950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=632950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=632950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}