Longtime ESPN producer Nicole Noren had been with the network since 2000. She won six Emmys and a Peabody. But that decorated run came to an end in 2024, and she blamed ESPN's unabashed embrace of sports gambling for her departure.
Ever since the Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on sports betting, gambling ads have become an unavoidable aspect of the sports-viewing experience. But when it came to ESPN, the backslide into full-on betting promotions was gradual.
When ESPN launched its failed ESPN Bet in 2023, Noren knew she had to leave and claimed she saw a culture where network leadership would punt stories that were critical of gambling relationships on the business side.
Speaking to the Columbia Journalism Review, Noren explained why
she left:
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.
She added of ESPN's carelessness when it comes to enabling gambling addition, "I’m not going to work for a gambling company and have blood on my hands.”
After the ESPN Bet app failed, ESPN reached a partnership with Draft Kings to promote the book's odds on ESPN platforms. We have yet to see any indication that ESPN plans to step back from pushing viewers to the gambling space.
You can read the full interview here.
This article originally appeared on For The Win: 24-year ESPN vet said she resigned in protest over network's embrace of sports betting
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