PBS Examination Of Sports Betting Provides Balance In Face Of Tilted Framing

InGame Let me give you a hypothetical scenario. Let’s say there’s a network — we’ll call it the Private Broadcasting Service — and it’s airing an hour-long roundtable-style show about sports betting. And the discussion and debate are lively, until, with a few minutes left in the hour, all of the panelists pull off what we thought were their faces, Mission: Impossible -style, to reveal they are not actually notable gaming, sports, or media figures, but rather are all either aliens, robots, or amorphous gelatinous organisms.

In this scenario, would you find it worthwhile to dissect the viewpoints they offered on sports gambling back when you believed they were actual humans? I’m exaggerating to make a point. But if you watched the hour-long special Breaking the Deadlock : Gambling With Your Life that aired on PBS (as in, the Public Broadcasting Service) Tuesday night, you know the exaggeration isn’t too terribly disconnected from reality.

Moderator Aaron Tang , an author and constitutional law professor at the University of California, Davis, gathered an esteemed and fairly evenly divided group of 10 panelists and led a spirited, often entertaining, and provocative discussion. But he did so within the framework of a hypothetical scenario that was consistently slanted in an anti-gambling direction and eventually devolved into side scenarios that had no clear connection to gambling. The premise involved a young man named Jeremy, who lived in the state of “Middlevania” and bet on a site called “FanFuel.

” There were further creative flourishes, but that was the foundation. It was a perfectly reasonable set-up. But as Tang continued to advance the story, every new development was based around Jeremy being a problem gambler and spiraling deeper into his addiction.