CNN Just Cracked Open Pandora’s Box That’s Worse Than Any Fake News Hoax

Daily Caller ^ | 12/05/2025 | John Loftus

[DFG]

CNN has opened up a Pandora’s box that’s worse than any fake news hoax the outlet could ever possibly peddle.

On Tuesday, the network announced an “official partnership” with the online platform Kalshi, which allows users to wager on anything from a sports game to whether J.D. Vance will be the GOP nominee in 2028, to how much money Darth Vader’s lightsaber will fetch at auction. Kalshi is a “prediction market,” and users are trading “contracts” on future events. So, somehow, it is legally distinct from gambling.

“As part of the partnership, CNN will get access to Kalshi’s data through an API, or backend interface, that automatically updates in real time,” Axios reported. “That data will be featured on CNN’s air through a real-time data ticker and can be referenced across CNN’s platforms when journalists discuss news predictions.”

Of course, neither CNN nor Kalshi has addressed the ethics elephant in the newsroom, as of publication. CNN anchors, reporters, and commentators do not determine events throughout the country and world. But they certainly influence them, enough to move markets. For example, if CNN published a story that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had a terminal illness, but that story later turned out to be false, Nvidia’s stock would have likely plummeted regardless, and billions of dollars could have been wiped out in a matter of minutes.

How will this power affect their coverage now that they are partnered with a betting platform? CNN will likely get a cut of the Kalshi gambling revenue, so how will that affect which events they choose to cover? Will the popularity of bets on Kalshi’s platform drive their coverage? Are they going to do segments on Darth Vader’s lightsaber because it drives the most wagering? Will all these CNN employees, from the executives to the bookers, be barred from betting on people or events they cover in the news? Where are the guardrails? What if anonymous sources, whether in government or working for a sports franchise, leak them stories to drive betting markets in a certain direction?

It’s quite an ethical quagmire, to say nothing of the pure degeneracy of it all. There is so much room for insider trading and manipulation that it boggles the mind.

Here’s a good example: As former Daily Caller News Foundation reporter Andrew Kerr pointed out, Kalshi has a market on whether CNN host Fareed Zakaria will say the word “democracy” at some point during his show Sunday. How many CNN employees are quietly wagering some money on this? If I were a betting man, I would say somebody is.

This is insane.

CNN is partnering with a gambling app that is currently accepting bets on whether or not CNN host Fareed Zakaria will say the word “Democracy” during his show this coming Sunday. https://t.co/jYpKxltR64 pic.twitter.com/kpmWczcBQ0

— Andrew Kerr (@AndrewKerrNC) December 3, 2025

The grim trend is already catching on in TV news. A couple days after the CNN news broke, CNBC announced its own “exclusive partnership” with Kalshi.

“Starting in 2026, CNBC will incorporate exclusive Kalshi predictions market data into its programs, including ‘Squawk Box’ and ‘Fast Money’, offering viewers a unique perspective on how event forecasts and probabilities are shifting in real time. A Kalshi ticker will run alongside segments of CNBC’s on-air programming. Kalshi will also launch a CNBC page on its site, featuring CNBC-selected markets,” the network said in a press release.

Worse yet, Kalshi’s co-founder, Tarek Mansour, recently told a panel at Future of Global Markets 2025 Conference that the ultimate goal of his company is to “financialize everything” and “create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.”

Yes, because if there’s anything America needs more of, it’s complex financial instruments that extract wealth from people without actually producing anything tangible in the real world. Our public infrastructure will crumble, but at least we can bet on where Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce will honeymoon.

Corporate media is already corrupt enough as it is. But adding Kalshi into the mix is a death sentence. CNN, CNBC, and all the other networks that may follow suit are throwing away their last shreds of credibility and integrity (not that they had much of any before).

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TOPICS: Politics
KEYWORDS: betting; disinfobusiness; gambling; kalshi; newsmanipulation; predictionmarket; trumpcryptoisok; wagers

[ClearCase_guy]

Kill the media.
Kill government schools.

Nothing changes until things change.
Change everything.

[ComputerGuy]

I will not be outbid for that lightsaber!
Just how long is a nanosecond, anyway?.
In actual time.

[sopo]

I just read about the female co-founder, has become the youngest female billionaire in history , age 29, she grew up in Brazil and was an intense ballerina student, then went to M.I.T.,where she ran into Mansour.

[Made In The USA]

Scraping the bottom of the bucket for viewers and advertisers

So glad that trash is not on every damn TV at the airport anymore,

[Bernard]

Gambling scandals at CNN? Has this predictive market set odds on that yet?

[libertarian66]

She’s not a billionaire, not even on paper. You’re confusing the stock paper face value with actual money. She doesnt even own the company, only part of it, and that only because Mansour did it and she hitched her wagon to his.

You think a 29 year old ballerina in any way knows how to drive computer-based betting markets? The man drove the company, the woman pretends to. Think Bezos and his wife.

Any female “billionaire” is suspect. As soon as the one claiming to become a biotech billionaire claimed to invent genetic technology I publicly said she was lying. She was, and she’s in jail. Kylie Jenner never reached a billion in actual net worth no matter what Forbes screams. It is media hype, not real.

There may actually be no self made female billionaires at all.

[sopo]

I guess I shouldn’t believe everything I read in newspaper

https://www.aol.com/lifestyle/29-old-former-ballerina-becomes-175840491.html

[griswold3]

I can imagine living in The Truman Show complete with script and directors. Too late to regret making a vice a major source of revenue.

[BipolarBob]

This is HUGE conflict of interest. With the media, they could influence certain outcomes.

[9YearLurker]

We already have fake media polls influencing opinions, so a little donor cash into these prediction markets should create another venue for that.

[Beowulf9]

There was just a big scandal with betting and the sports channel. This doesn’t seem very smart.

I wonder if the maf is behind this?

[Chewbarkah]

Circumstantial evidence implies Jake Tapper bet BIG on the J5 Bomber being a “white man”...

[Ditto]

CNN partnering with a gambling app. So is the NFL. What could go wrong?

[BipolarBob]

Yeah, that gambling ad at the bottom of NFL broadcasts while the scandal was ongoing seemed surreal.

[The Great RJ]

I’ll put up a dollar that Joe Biden will have assumed room temperature by the end of 2026 and $2 that no painting by Hunter Biden will hang in the Louvre.

[aquila48]

"Kalshi was founded in 2018 by Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara. When Tarek, an Algerian-born quant whiz, met Luana, a Brazilian financial analyst, in college, the two bonded over something unusual, which is a shared obsession with uncertainty.

Years later, that obsession turned into Kalshi, that claims to be the first and only federally regulated prediction market in the US, where people legally trade on real-world events like elections, interest rates, inflation reports, and even the Oscars. "

[aquila48]

It’s not much different than buying and selling stock options.

[dfwgator]

[Tellurian]

There may actually be no self made female billionaires at all.

Ya wanna bet on that?

/s