Earlier this week, investigative journalist Nicole Noren did something almost impossible for someone who has spent her career behind the scenes. The longtime producer for ESPN’s Outside the Lines used her own experience to shed light on the way sports betting partnerships are warping sports media coverage. The issue wasn’t how ESPN was covering sports gambling, but that it was doing so less and less.
Noren was used to pitching hard-hitting stories around leagues, owners and athletes. As a producer for the investigative reporting arm of the sports network, her team had traditionally been insulated from the business concerns at ESPN, but she started to notice a change about seven years ago. Some of the people involved intended to make it much more hard-hitting and hold the gambling companies accountable.
Let’s just say the final product didn’t end up doing that.” Noren, who detailed a family history that included seeing her grandfather, father and brother’s lives unspool due to gambling addiction, left the network in 2023 after ESPN announced the debut of ESPN BET, a partnership with Penn Entertainment. When reached for this story, Noren declined to comment further. ESPN released a statement in response: “ESPN remains committed to journalism that serves sports fans, holds powerful interests accountable and earns our audience’s 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.” Before he retired in 2019, Bob Ley was the venerable face of Outside the Lines, which included a daily network show with deeply reported TV packages and roundtable discussions on the biggest issues in sports. (Full disclosure: I was a contributor to that show from 2010 to 2017 while working at ESPN.) “The greatest luxury in television is time and investigative reporting is the feature of a mature news organization,” said Ley, one of the most respected anchors in sports. During his tenure at the Worldwide Leader, Ley said, reporters had the leeway to cover entities that had a business relationship with ESPN. If that meant uncovering something unsavory, reporters would have editorial support and ask the subjects of those stories for comment.
Sometimes, Ley said, the access even improved those stories. The network canceled Outside the Lines as a regular show in 2023, although some content is still produced under the brand. A former reporter at the network, who didn’t want to be named since they still work in media, said that the brand is obviously pulling back from investigative journalism, although there are still excellent journalists producing quality work, as ESPN pivots toward entertainment.
Meanwhile Mike Foss, an ESPN executive vice-president, told a conference last week that popular sports personality Pat McAfee “might be a journalist at heart”. To have a former producer at ESPN say it is eye-opening.” In 2018, the US supreme court overturned the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, allowing states to regulate sports betting markets within their boundaries. Since then, 39 states and Washington DC have established some form of sports betting, although there is wide variation in what is allowed state-to-state.
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