Next, from insider betting to game rigging, a wave of scandals is rocking the sports world.

According to our next guest, it just proves how gambling is reshaping the industry with alarming effect.

A national poll says six in ten Americans now question the integrity of sport.

Journalist Joon Lee has written about this for the New York Times, and he joins Michelle Martin to explain exactly how betting is changing the game for the worse.

Thanks, Christiane.

Joon Lee, thank you so much for speaking with us.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

I appreciate it.

So you covered the NBA and Major League Baseball from major outlets.

You've been writing about how sports betting is reshaping the entire culture around sports.

So before we get into that, for people who perhaps haven't followed this that closely, tell us what are a couple of the scandals that have really gotten our attention.

So the major scandal right now in the NBA is player Terry Rozier, the Portland Trail Blazers coach, Shauncie Billups, who's also a Hall of Famer, and some others who are involved in this major gambling ring that's tied to the mafia and has also been tied to rigging prop bets.

And so what that kind of entails is a player like Terry Rozier basically deciding to sit out because people that he knows have decided to bet on him and whether or not he's going to hit an over and under.

So like, for example, a sports book might say that the odds on a guy, the over under on a guy might be 12 and a half points on a given night.

So you bet whether or not he's going to hit over 12 and a half points or under that.

And a player in theory could tell their friends that they're going to be sitting out after the first half and that they should be trying to hit the under as much as possible.

And that in turn would allow their friends to make money off of their friends sitting out of the basketball game.

And prop bets being that you're not betting on the entire outcome.

You're betting on like a specific action, right?

Yes, because sports gambling over the course of the last few years have expanded to a point where it's not just about the wins and losses.

You can bet on something as small as the outcome of an individual pitch in a baseball game.

You can bet on the length of the national anthem before the Super Bowl.

You can bet on whether or not Travis Kelce is going to propose to Taylor Swift if the Chiefs win the Super Bowl.

You can basically bet on anything that happens within the confines of a stadium during a sports game now.

So let's talk about Major League Baseball.

There was a recent scandal took place just earlier this month where the Department of Justice charged two Cleveland Guardians players, Emmanuel Clasé and Luis Ortiz, over their alleged roles to rig bets on pitches thrown during MLB games.

Just briefly tell us about that.

Yeah, and so this is also tied to the prop bets where someone like Emmanuel Clasé, who was one of the best relief pitchers in all of baseball, someone who the Guardians could rely on to come in to close games when the games were tight and basically make sure that the other team doesn't score so that the Guardians would win.

He basically had this arrangement where he would throw the first pitch into the dirt and his first pitch percentage of strikes was much lower than the rest of the pitches he threw throughout the course of a game.

And it turns out that he was part of this ring tide where he was basically having his friends bet on the first pitch that he would throw in a baseball game being a ball so that they could make extra money off of it and he would get a kickback from that.

So let me just say, Emmanuel Classé's lawyer issued a statement saying he's innocent of all charges.

He looks forward to clearing his name in court.

Luis Ortiz's lawyer also gave a statement denying the charges and said Ortiz has never and would never improperly influence a game, not for anybody, not for anything.

Going back to the NBA case, Chauncey Billups' lawyer gave a statement saying anybody who knows Chauncey Billups knows he's a man of integrity.

Men of integrity do not cheat and defraud others.

And they say Chauncey Billups has never and would never gamble on basketball games, provide insider information, or sacrifice the trust of his team and the league.

Terry Rozier's attorney gave a statement via the Athletic and said Terry was cleared by the NBA and these prosecutors revived that non-case.

Terry is not a gambler, but he is not afraid of a fight, and he looks forward to winning this fight.

It's important to know, people are still innocent until they're proven guilty in a court of law.

But having said that, you've been writing about the fact that you just think this whole, there's a core issue here that sports gambling, which has been embraced by the sports leagues now, you feel has just really just changed the whole kind of ecosystem.

Tell us why you say that.

Yeah, there's two things I think going on.

First on kind of a sports world level.

Gambling is now the major driver of revenue for the sports leagues, whether it comes to TV ratings, the advertising for sports media outlets and sports journalism.

It has its fingers in basically every single nook and cranny of the industry.

You know, if you go back about 2011, 2012, there was a big panic that was happening among the sports leagues because TV ratings were falling, because people my age who were in college at the time were not watching sports as frequently because there were so many other entertainment options, whether it was social media or Netflix or other streaming services, YouTube.

The sports leagues faced way more competition for eyeballs and attention than they ever had in the past.

And research found both internally within the leagues and externally that younger people were more engaged with sports when they were tied to doing fantasy sports or with sports betting.

And so there was a push because of the falling TV rings and the falling potential revenue that the leagues wanted to have sports gambling legalized in order to save their entire business.

And so that was the foundation of being able to make sure that the lights stay on and that the players get paid.

And so as a result, there was a lobbying effort that started in New Jersey but started happening across the country as well to kind of integrate daily fantasy sports initially and then the legalization of sports betting and the kind of foundation of sports culture.

And so that's when you saw -- started seeing kind of this massive push for sports gambling ads across every single game.

First it was daily fantasy and then it was sports gambling.

And you now see this across sports journalism outlets as well where if you turn on a game, whether it's on ESPN or any of the other major networks that broadcast sports, sports gambling ads are everywhere.

And it funds a lot of the work that's done outside of broadcasting as well, whether it's the sports journalism or the sports commentary or the sports podcast world.

It's impossible to kind of escape the grip of sports gambling.

So just say a little bit more about how gambling is just really integrated into the entire ecosystem.

It's not just the ads.

Yeah.

So like in the pregame show before the game, people are speculating about what might happen in the game tonight.

There'll be a segment on the gambling odds for the evening.

What are the percentage chances that this team is going to beat that team or this player is going to score a certain number of points or hit a home run.

Within the games, you'll see live betting odds as well integrated into that.

You know, there's the ads and then there's the way that people talk about the athletes as well.

There's an evolution from kind of the narrative, the bigger picture stories about the human beings involved in the game that have kind of been pushed aside and has now centered, you know, what are the odds of this happening?

Can you win money off of this?

Did that field goal being missed wide right, you know, affect the odds and the over-unders and are gamblers going to be mad?

And you see this too when you talk to athletes as well.

You know, I have conversations across sports in locker rooms, and players are getting harassed in their Instagram direct messages by fans who have lost money because of something that they did during a game.

And it doesn't matter if they perform well or if they perform poorly.

Athletes are getting harassed either way, because regardless of how well they do, someone is losing money as a result of their performance.

When you say harassed, what do you mean?

Racial slurs, homophobic slurs, death threats.

Threatening their families, death threats, right.

People doxing their addresses.

Like, it kind of covers the entire gamut.

And there has been arrests made of people who have sent threatening messages to athletes.

People have had to report it up to the leagues.

Like, this is an issue that is becoming really, really widespread.

It's not just limited to the players themselves, it's also to the spouses and the children of athletes, anyone in this universe.

People are getting harassed regardless of how an athlete performs on the field.

And you're not just talking about professional athletes at this point, right?

You're talking about college athletes as well?

Yeah, this is also happening at the college level because you can bet on pretty much any college game that there is right now.

And so people with, you know, who aren't necessarily even public figures, who aren't making millions and millions of dollars for, you know, to play a child's game basically, are getting harassed because, you know, they're trying to basically make their way through college and, you know, pay for their education.

I mean, you've been a sports guy for a long time.

Do any of your peers, the people you talk to, feel like there's kind of an "ick" factor now?

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of... The thing that they loved about it has been sort of taken away?

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of sports journalists who feel like they can't speak out about how it's changed their relation to the sports because sports gambling funds their careers and it funds a lot of journalism these days.

And so there's kind of a tiptoe, third rail avoidance of talking about the topic with any sense of honesty.

I think this kind of ties into the larger shifts that we've seen in media where a lot of the big magazines don't cover sports in the same way that they used to.

The Sports Illustrated is a shell of itself.

ESPN the magazine folded within I think six months of me starting at the company.

That kind of long form kind of human-centric storytelling doesn't really exist in sports in the same way that it used to.

At the same time, the journalists who are rising in their careers are the people who are feeding into the sports gambling ecosystem through transaction reporting.

It's about who got traded where and who signed where and what is the kind of implication for this game upcoming week when there's injuries going on.

That's what is now, I think, centric to a lot of the sports reporting.

And that was not necessarily the reporting that I grew up reading or watching on television, a lot of which has just gotten defunded as a result of the changing media ecosystem.

So the sports books like Draft Kings and FanDuel say that these scandals that you were telling us about show that their monitoring systems are working, that regulated betting flags suspicious behavior, that they are providing actual safeguards.

What do you say to that?

I think that it is accurate that we're probably catching stuff that we might not have before.

At the same time, I'm not sure how much that matters because if the perception of integrity is falling among sports fans, that's more important than what the actual integrity of the league is at any given moment.

There was a poll that came out in Sacred Heart this last week after all of these scandals and gambling with the Guardians and with Terry Rozier and Chauncey Billups came out.

75% of sports gamblers, not even sports fans, sports gamblers believe that corruption extends beyond just the NBA and exists across all sports with sports gambling right now.

That is terrible news for the leagues.

Even if things are getting caught, it is the perception of whether or not the leagues have integrity in the first place that supersedes whether or not that integrity is working at all.

And ultimately, sports doesn't matter, but people care about it because of that integrity.

And it really scares me as a sports fan and also as an American that sports is one of these major institutions that people try to find trust in in this country.

And we live in a time where institutional trust is collapsing.

I think that this is just another example of it.

Because, you know, if sports, a thing that ostensibly doesn't matter in terms of affecting the direction of humanity, if the integrity of that is collapsing, what does that say for things like our government or the, you know, the legacy media?

There's a lot of other concerns I think kind of are a domino effect if people start to lose their trust in something that ostensibly doesn't matter like sports.

The leagues are responding to this by, I would say, emphasizing integrity.

Like, for example, NBA commissioner Adam Silver called the federal charges against Chauncey Billups, Terry Rozier, and others "deeply disturbing."

And he said that they raised serious questions about the league's relationship with gambling.

He said to a reporter, "There's nothing more important to the league and its fans than the integrity of the competition."

What do you think?

How do you respond to that?

It feels like a slap on the wrist.

It feels like narrowing in on what the issue is when I think the larger picture issue is that gambling culture and the gambling mindset has infiltrated and taken over the way that people engage with our country.

And so it's not just about these small bets.

It's about the way that we engage with other people and the way that people engage in politics now.

I was walking down the street during the New York City mayor's race and I saw on the streets ads for Cal Shane Polymarket, these prediction markets who are putting gambling odds on Zoran Mamdani versus Andrew Cuomo.

People are thinking about politics through the lens of the sports gambling now.

When you're putting democracy and you're putting, you know, sometimes the lives of these politicians in the hands of these odds, it's quite frightening.

I remember when Charlie Kirk got assassinated, that Pauly Martin and Kalashnikov had to take down betting markets on his political future.

Like, this is no longer a thing that is just about sports.

It's about how the sports gambling mindset has taken over the way that many people engage with sports gambling.

And I think that's a really important part of the culture in the United States.

Yeah, interesting.

You run a sports media guy YouTube channel.

You don't take gambling ads.

Yeah, I mean, one of the reasons why when I launched my YouTube channel that I announced I wasn't taking sports gambling ads was I felt that the way that coverage was being shaped was being dramatically influenced by the influence of gambling money.

I would hear conversations with people in the executive level, texting, phone calls, coffees, that kind of stuff, talking to my journalist friends, and then I would see the coverage of what was actually going on presented to the public.

And there was often a massive gap between what was presented to the public and what the journalists, what the executives were actually thinking about what was going on.

And people, I felt like, were dancing around issues that were just a little bit harder to tackle because of financial interests, whether it's from the league or for the networks.

And I felt as if, you know, for the average sports fan, sports media wasn't thinking about their experience in the same way anymore.

If you read sports media coverage today, sports coverage of teams, there's a lot of point of view from the people who actually run the business or from the general managers and the decisions that people are making about players.

But no one is really talking about how those decisions affect the experience of fans.

And I think we're just seeing that kind of continue to grow within the sports landscape where the cost of being a sports fan has exploded.

I wrote an article for the New York Times about how if you kind of tie together all the streaming services that you need in order to watch sports, it's raised -- it has risen 250% over the course of the last 20 years.

At the same time, wages have only risen about 70-something percent.

And so it is dramatically outpacing -- the cost of being a sports fan is dramatically outpacing how much money people are making these days.

And so all of that stuff being tied together has, I think, degraded the experience of being a sports fan.

And, as a result, I feel as if sports fans are just being squeezed out for every single last dollar that they have right now.

>> Well, before you go, do you think, is there a way to put the genie back in the bottle?

I mean, do you see any sign that any of the players in this ecosystem as you describe it, are willing to take a step back and say, we're destroying the fans relationship with the sport.

We're destroying the athletes relationships with their sport.

I just wonder if there's anybody other than you saying, you know, hold on here.

Let's let's take a breath.

It will take fans realizing that they have much more power than they realize.

I think back to what happened with the Super League in Europe all the time when, you know, all these major European soccer clubs kind of unite together to try to create the Super League.

That was kind of a major boundary crossed by these owners because it kind of took away from the local tradition of the Spanish Soccer League or the British Soccer League, the Premier League or the Italian Soccer League.

And fans protested in the street.

They literally blocked buses of players from being able to go into the stadium.

There was a major political protest over how owners were treating sports fans.

And that kind of political kind of organization hasn't happened in American sports.

Sports is a place where fans pay money and it goes directly into the pockets of a lot of the richest people in our country.

And I think when fans realize that they have power to actually affect the lives of a lot of these billionaires and their kind of massive plans for global growth, there would have to be some sort of more political organization that is more similar to what has happened in Europe and the relationship that soccer fans have with their own teams than what has historically happened in the United States.

Until that happens, it's hard for me to imagine anything changing.

>> Joon Lee, thanks so much for talking with us.

Thanks so much for having me.