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News clip: Seven aid workers just trying to feed the hungry were killed.

Micah Loewinger: The IDF strike on a convoy of aid workers in Gaza this week has thrown a food crisis into overdrive.

Mehul Srivastava: It's an incredibly unsafe environment. Agencies can't trust that their employees will be safe.

Micah Loewinger: Now President Biden is urging a ceasefire. From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media, I'm Micah Loewinger. As famine looms, how have warring media narratives threatened UNRWA, Gaza's most important source of aid? I asked a US senator.

Chris Van Hollen: I have looked at the US intelligence on this, and my interpretation is that that claim has been totally overblown.

Micah Loewinger: Plus, sports media reckons with its gambling addiction.

Brian Moritz: People who gamble are like your best readers. They care about everything. What is a gambler's edge? It's information.

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Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this.

Katya: Hi, it's me Katya, EP of On The Media. Over the last couple of weeks, we've been in your ears asking for help to support the show. You've heard from Brooke, you've heard from Micah, now it's my turn. As the manager of this outfit, I am not going to dress it up for you, I'm going to tell you how it is. If every single one of you, every single one of our listeners gave $1 to the show right now, we'd have enough to cover the budget for a couple of years but that's just not a realistic goal. What is a realistic goal is getting the 2% of you who donate up to 3%. It's just 1% difference. Maybe you're listening to me now and you're thinking, "Oh, I'll get to it later," or, "It's just too complicated to make a donation," or even, "Someone else will do it." Well, here's what I have to say to you. Don't put it off. Do it now. It's super easy at our website. It's literally one click. Do you expect someone else to pay for your New York Times subscription or your Netflix account? No, right? It's time to pay for On The Media. We're counting on you guys. Thanks.

Micah Loewinger: From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. On Thursday, six months into the Israeli-Palestinian war, the United States officially called for a ceasefire.

Antony Blinken: To stabilize and improve the humanitarian situation and protect innocent civilians.

Brooke Gladstone: Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

Antony Blinken: He urged Prime Minister Netanyahu to empower his negotiators to conclude a deal without delay to bring the hostages home.

Brooke Gladstone: This following news from Monday night when Israeli Defense Forces, the IDF, fired on World Central Kitchen aid workers in Gaza.

News clip: The victims fled from one car to another but they were targeted again and then again.

News clip: Even though the non-profit says it was coordinating its movement with Israel's military.

News clip: Seven aid workers were killed.

News clip: Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the incident tragic and unintentional, also saying, "This happens in war."

News clip: World Central Kitchen had been distributing 350,000 meals a day.

News clip: The WCK has now pulled all of its operations, at least temporarily, from Gaza.

Brooke Gladstone: The UN's World Food Program has scaled back its operations along with two other humanitarian organizations, Project Hope and ANERA, American Near East Refugee Aid.

Rebecca Abou-Chedid: This is the first time in 56 years that we've had to pause operations.

Brooke Gladstone: Rebecca Abou-Chedid, an ANERA board member, speaking to NPR.

Rebecca Abou-Chedid: It's also the first time that we've lost a staff member, Musa Shawwa, in an Israeli missile strike. There have been almost 200 humanitarian aid workers that have died in the past six months.

Brooke Gladstone: That death toll includes at least 176 employees of UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Administration for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. Founded in 1949, the organization manages education, health and many other services for some 6 million Palestinian refugees across the region. With over 13,000 UNRWA workers in Gaza, it was by far the largest group working with Israel to bring in aid to the Strip until last week.

News clip: The UN agency for Palestinian refugees says Israel will no longer allow their food convoys from entering northern Gaza, where people are dying of hunger.

News clip: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is now calling for an end to UNRWA. He also specifically is accusing UNRWA officials of being complicit in the October 7th Hamas attack against Israel.

Mehul Srivastava: I was there in Israel at the time. It became the only subject people talked about for about three weeks, I imagine.

Micah Loewinger: Mehul Srivastava is a correspondent at the Financial Times, where until recently he served as Jerusalem bureau chief.

Mehul Srivastava: The idea that somebody who was on the payroll of a 75-year-old agency whose job is to care for Palestinians had maybe taken part in some of the atrocities against Israeli citizens on October 7th kicked off a pretty furious news cycle.

Micah Loewinger: It began on January 26th when UNRWA announced it had fired 10 Palestinian employees who had allegedly participated in the October 7th attacks. These allegations came from Israeli intelligence, and over the next few days media across the world got their hands on an Israeli dossier.

Mehul Srivastava: We saw the dossier. We described it in our stories for our readers. It was a summary of a set of allegations, conclusions that this unnamed intelligence agency had reached, and it had the names of a few people and rather broad allegations against UNRWA at large but they didn't have any of the supporting evidence.

Micah Loewinger: That's interesting because one of the first articles in the American press about these allegations came from the AP, which referred to "detailed allegations against UNRWA workers." Either the AP had access to something else, or they characterized it differently than you are now.

Mehul Srivastava: Well, the allegations are detailed. It's the evidence that was scanned in the document that we saw. The allegations were very specific that this person and that person had crossed over into Israel proper, had taken part in this or this atrocity. There was one indication that it came from cell phone location data and from ID cards that were retrieved from bodies that were found inside Israel after they'd been killed by security forces there. It wasn't presented as, "Well, look at this ID card. Look at this location data. This is how we reached this very, very damning conclusion about this one individual," and then repeated the process for another 12 people.

Micah Loewinger: Early media reports emphasized other allegations from Israeli intelligence. On January 29th, Reuters ran a story with the headline "Israel accuses 190 UN staff of being hardened militants." The Wall Street Journal's piece on that same day featured the subheading "Around 10% of Palestinian aid agencies, 12,000 staff in Gaza have links to militants, according to intelligence dossier."

Mehul Srivastava: I can tell you that the documents that we saw did not provide any evidence for these things. Perhaps Reuters or the Wall Street Journal had access to a deeper document than I had but our understanding from speaking to other people within the Israeli intelligence networks is that at some point during a raid that took place in a certain part of the Gaza Strip, a computer was taken away for examination and there was a list of members on that and they cross-referenced that with the employee list that UNRWA has and reached this conclusion.

I've not seen this computer. I've not seen this evidence. This was only described to me by somebody who I've spoken to for quite some time and that's the extent of what the dossier said. It just said, "Further, we have now reached the conclusion that 190 people have ties to Hamas militants," but it didn't provide any evidence for that.

Micah Loewinger: Tell me about what, if any other proof has emerged to help corroborate Israel's account since the story first broke.

Mehul Srivastava: There's been a small drip drip of facts that were either presented in Israeli media or in other media that included CCTV footage of one person that was described as an UNRWA employee picking up a body from one of the kibbutzes in the south on October 7th. Then there was later on headshots of all these people who were named that were leaked to the Israeli media which were their identity photos.

Micah Loewinger: The Washington Post also reported on this CCTV footage.

Mehul Srivastava: We've looked at the same footage and I know a lot of other people did and it did match the kind of behavior and activities we'd seen Hamas militants take part in on October 7th.

Micah Loewinger: A couple of days after these allegations were first made public, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said during a press conference.

Antony Blinken: The reports that we got last week and UNRWA brought them to us were deeply, deeply troubling.

Micah Loewinger: He went on to say.

Antony Blinken: We haven't had the ability to investigate them ourselves, but they are highly, highly credible.

Micah Loewinger: What do you think he was basing this on?

Mehul Srivastava: He's the US Secretary of State. He has access to information that I don't have, especially given the depth of the relationship US intelligence services have with Israeli intelligence services.

Micah Loewinger: This is part of why I wanted to speak with Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland. When we spoke on Monday, I asked him about Israel's claim that 10% of UNRWA is affiliated with Hamas or other militants.

Chris Van Hollen: I have looked at the US intelligence on this and let me just say that my interpretation of that is that that claim has been totally overblown and I will leave it at that.

Micah Loewinger: You got to give me more than that.

Chris Van Hollen: I think the evidence is insufficient. I would also make another point, which is that UNRWA year after year has provided not only Israel, but the United States with the names of all of their employees in Gaza, all 13,000. Israel has a very capable intelligence service that can always vet those and report any concerns to UNRWA. With respect to the up to 14 members of UNRWA who may well have been complicit in the horrors of October, 7th, absolutely. They need to be investigated. They need to be fully held accountable. The reality is that we shouldn't punish 2 million innocent Palestinians in Gaza who rely on UNRWA to provide that desperately needed assistance because of the terrible alleged acts of 14.

Micah Loewinger: Last month, Congress passed a bill that will ban US funds for the agency through 2025 as part of the last-minute spending bill. Although he opposed it, Senator Van Hollen voted for the bill. He told me because he wanted to avoid a government shutdown.

Chris Van Hollen: Many of my colleagues have fallen for the big Netanyahu government lie, which is that UNRWA is somehow a proxy or an agent of Hamas. This is just pure nonsense. Netanyahu has been trying to get rid of UNRWA since about 2017. Long before the most recent allegations arose. The person on the ground in Gaza, who is the main point person for UNRWA, is actually a US Army vet, about a 20-year vet in the US Army. I've met with him personally, I can assure you he is not an agent of Hamas.

Micah Loewinger: Still, Israeli officials say they can no longer let UNRWA aid into Northern Gaza and that aid in general is scarce because Hamas is taking it.

Jonathan Conricus: It's a Palestinian that spoke with an Israeli officer who said, so.

Micah Loewinger: IDF Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Conricus on NBC.

Jonathan Conricus: That he sees UNRWA workers that are controlled by Hamas and that Hamas goes into UNRWA facilities and takes food. Food that is paid for by US taxpayers' dollars.

Micah Loewinger: President Biden's US Envoy in the region has said that Israel has not provided American officials with evidence of the claim that Hamas is stealing aid. Mehul Srivastava of the Financial Times doesn't believe it either.

Mehul Srivastava: There is no overwhelming evidence to support that allegation. We have seen isolated incidents where there's been video on social media of perhaps somebody who may be tied to Hamas being involved in maybe one convoy or one truck. I would say this, at this moment right now, there's several different battles that are going on. There's the actual fighting between the IDF and Hamas militants.

There's a diplomatic battle going on at the UN, at the ICJ, at other places and there's a media battle going on. The Israeli Army has had for a very long time of very well-developed and very effective media outreach program. This is their point of view that the reason people in Gaza are hungry right now is because Hamas is stealing the food.

Micah Loewinger: The media battle that Mehul Srivastava described rages on in Washington DC where advocates like Senator Chris Van Hollen have used the press to try to alter the course of the war. You've been on quite a media tour. You've been on Face the Nation, CBS, MSNBC.

Chris Van Hollen: We need to focus on getting the hostages back and a ceasefire. This is why I'm for a ceasefire. We have a situation where Netanyahu continues to essentially give the finger to the President of the United States and we're sending--

Micah Loewinger: Who are you trying to reach by doing these interviews, the President? What's your goal?

Chris Van Hollen: Look, obviously, I hope to influence the President and the Biden administration. I've been critical about the fact that they have not used effectively all the tools they have to try to enforce the President's own demands on getting more assistance into Gaza. When you've got people who are dying of starvation, literally until the President's demands requests have been met, it doesn't seem to make sense to be giving a blank check to the Netanyahu government in the form of additional bombs and other kinds of equipment.

Micah Loewinger: Do you think we will give that blank check anyway?

Chris Van Hollen: Right now, the Biden administration has decided to send more bombs. In my view, they essentially, once again, found a way to do an end-run around the congressional notification process. The congressional notification process provides an opportunity for concerned members of Congress to weigh in against any proposed transfer. By structuring these latest transfers the way they did, the Biden administration has done an end-run around that process.

Micah Loewinger: Senator, I'm just trying to understand what motivates you personally. Why are you devoting so much time to this issue given how controversial it can be for a member of Congress to repeatedly accuse the President of Israel of lying? What's driving you on this fight?

Chris Van Hollen: I do believe we have to be true to our values and our principles and that we cannot apply them only to our adversaries. We have to also apply them to friends and allies. If we don't do that, we will lose credibility everywhere around the world, which is what I'm afraid is happening right now as we speak. If we want to argue that we stand for democracy and we stand for human rights, that we have to fight for those principles no matter what the circumstances are.

Otherwise, we are justifiably accused of applying double standards and being hypocrites. I stand with the President in supporting Israel's right to self-defense in the aftermath of October 7th, but how it conducts a just war matters, and it needs to be conducted justly.

Micah Loewinger: Senator, thank you very much.

Chris Van Hollen: Thank you.

Micah Loewinger: Christopher Van Hollen is a senator for Maryland

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up a history of UNRWA includes some shared DNA with depression era work programs.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media.

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Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

News clip: UNRWA is a terror organization under the agency of the UN.

Micah Loewinger: We're listening to a February 5th protest outside UNRWA Jerusalem building recorded by The Times of Israel.

News clip: UNRWA kindergarten teachers learned to hate and want to kill Jews. They spent 75 years indoctrinating Arabs all around the world to hate Israel and to never accept its offer of peace.

Micah Loewinger: These accusations that UNRWA radicalizes Palestinian refugees long predate the latest war. Since 2022, UNRWA says it's investigated 66 neutrality breaches among its 30,000 workers, including alleged support for Hamas and other extremist groups

Mehul Srivastava: For about 20 or 30 years from now UNRWA has been a target of right-wing Israeli politicians for historical reasons.

Micah Loewinger: Mehul Srivastava Financial Times correspondent, who we heard from earlier in the show.

Mehul Srivastava: When UNRWA was set up in 1949, it was essentially the only international agency, the biggest UN agency taking care of Palestinian refugees, not just in Gaza in the West Bank, but in Lebanon, in Syria, Jordan, elsewhere. In '48, there were about 750,000 Palestinian refugees.

Micah Loewinger: Today, UNRWA is a quasi-state employing mostly Palestinian workers. Its size and scope would likely surprise its founders, who envisioned it as a temporary solution to the intractable politics in the region just after the establishment of Israel and the displacement of Palestinians.

Mehul Srivastava: One of its original mandates was based off resolution that refugees of the war from 1948 that birthed the state of Israel, have a right to return to their homeland.

Micah Loewinger: He's referring to UN General Assembly Resolution 194, which stated that, "Refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date." What Palestinians today call the right of return.

Mehul Srivastava: This issue, the right to return, has, over time, become one of the most politically explosive issues between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

Micah Loewinger: Lex Takkenberg is a humanitarian law expert and a former chief of ethics for UNRWA, where he worked for 30 years. He's written extensively about the origins of the agency, and he says that to understand the current day battle over UNRWA, you have to look at its predecessor, the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine, which was formed to mediate with the Arab nations and Israel and find a solution to the refugee crisis.

Lex Takkenberg: In early '49, they started to meet with Ben-Gurion, the first Israeli president, and urged him to take refugees back as demanded by the General Assembly. Ben-Gurion's answer was, "We're still in the formative stage. We have enough of a demographic issue with those Palestinians that did not leave. We're not going to take refugees back."

Micah Loewinger: Essentially, Ben-Gurion felt that giving citizenship to these Palestinian refugees would threaten Israel's Jewish majority.

Lex Takkenberg: That's what it comes down to. Towards the summer of '49, so six months into the mandate, they begin to think, okay, there are three solutions for refugee problems. The most desirable one is voluntary return, repatriation to where you come from. The next best is integration into the host countries, the countries of asylum. Then the third last resort is resettlement in certain countries,

Micah Loewinger: Some of the neighboring states worried that by permanently hosting these refugees, they would- undermine the right of return, and Israel, for demographic reasons, didn't want non-Jews affecting their nascent majority, so the UN started to scout for alternative paths forward. You say that this is when the UN did a big about-face, so a complete 180. Can you explain what happened next?

Lex Takkenberg: The Americans began to think, "How can we integrate the refugees starting in the economies of the host countries?" The idea came up to bring Gordon Club, the president of the Tennessee Valley Authority, one of the new deal schemes after the 29 financial market crash, to see whether that miracle in Tennessee could be replicated in the Jordan Valley, in the Euphrates Basin, in the Sinai.

Micah Loewinger: The Tennessee Valley Authority, which as you mentioned was the depression era public works project part of FDR's New Deal that brought economic development to Tennessee by hiring thousands of people to build essential infrastructure. The theory was essentially if we give Palestinians work, they'll have steady income and maybe through employment, they will assimilate outside of Palestine. The Israelis don't want to grant the right to return, but maybe through employment the Palestinians won't want to or need to return.

Lex Takkenberg: Exactly. This also explains why the US for many, many years paid 50% of UNRWA's budget. UNRWA was very much an instrument to help sustain Israel to take the pressure on return away. They thought that this could all go very quick. You set up these work streams, it takes a few years and then the host countries will take over responsibility and that's it. The host countries were suspicious from the beginning and so were the refugees themselves.

To make a long story short, the work in UNRWA name never got off the ground. The work schemes were shelved, but the refugees were still there, and they still needed support. It was not just shelter and food that they needed, they had children, so they needed education and healthcare. Basic relief became comprehensive humanitarian assistance.

Micah Loewinger: I want to talk about some of the major narratives about UNRWA in Israel. First, let's start with the idea that UNRWA is getting in the way of peace for Israel. This is something that I've seen in the Israeli Press and from Israeli officials.

Lex Takkenberg: It is peace as defined by these Israeli politicians that you'll refer to, which is a peace in which Israel succeeds in replacing the indigenous Palestinian population by a Jewish vast majority. The continued existence of UNRWA is seen as standing in the way of that. The right of return does not depend on whether UNRWA continues to exist. Their rights to return to compensation flows from the egality of what happened in '48, '49.

Micah Loewinger: Another narrative that I've heard referenced by Netanyahu is his frustration with the intergenerational refugee status that has been granted to descendants of the original Palestinian refugees. Back in 2017, 2018 when Netanyahu began trying to shut down UNRWA, he said that the agency could not go on dealing with the "great-grandchildren of refugees who are not refugees." Clearly, he takes issue with the definition of refugee that the UN uses.

Lex Takkenberg: Under the international refugee regime and under international refugee law, descendants of the original refugee whose situation is not resolved continue to be refugees. That is not unique for the Palestinian case. UNHCR dealing with other prolonged refugee crisis like the Afghan refugee crisis or some of the refugee crisis in Africa, is also dealing with intergenerational refugees. What makes the Palestinian case unique is that it has taken more than 75 years. There is still no political settlement.

Micah Loewinger: Another longstanding critique of UNRWA is that its schools in the Gaza Strip, West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, are radicalizing Palestinian young people. Where does this narrative come from? Is there evidence for that?

Lex Takkenberg: That critique originates in a criticism of the textbooks that are being used in the UNRWA schools. In those schools, textbooks were used of the host countries, Egypt at a time, and Jordan. Textbooks typically reflect the state of relations between the country in question and its neighbors.

Israel discovered that in these textbooks there were elements of glorification of armed resistance and antisemitic tropes that they strongly objected to. They started demanding a censorship of those textbooks, and by extension said schools in which those textbooks are used teach hate. It prompted UNRWA to set up in place an arrangement whereby all new textbooks that are coming up are scrutinized. Any objectable content is overridden with enrichment materials, but the issue of the textbooks has remained.

Micah Loewinger: Critics of UNRWA think it goes further than that. They think that the teachers themselves are too sympathetic to Hamas or Islamic Jihad. I want to play you a clip of UN Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer testifying before US Congress on January 30th in the lead-up to the American defunding of UNRWA.

Hillel Neuer: I've come here to ask the Congress of the United States to not just suspend but to end the funding for good and to take the lead in dissolving an organization that is riddled with incitement to hate, involvement in terrorism, and the perpetuation of war.

Lex Takkenberg: Hillel is part of an outfit that is part of the Israeli public affairs machinery to deal with any systematic criticism of Israeli actions in the occupied territories. UN Watch make generic statements. They have a track record of roaming the internet and finding objectionable social media post, in some instances have been posted by local UNRWA personnel, especially in the earlier war of 2014, when for the first time a war played out on social media.

At that time, UN Watch was able to compile a couple of dozen screenshots of UNRWA teachers and a few other employees in Gaza and in the West Bank that had put objectionable content on their social media profile. UN Watch continues to recycle that they have even used these old screenshots in their recent report.

Micah Loewinger: You touched on one perspective among the Palestinian refugee community and some of those who work for UNRWA. I'm sure during your 30 years, you became well aware of the diversity of opinions among Palestinians about UNRWA. I imagine some Palestinians are frustrated by the kind of contradiction of UNRWA, that it was created in the context of this right to return.

Lex Takkenberg: Whenever UNRWA said, we are going to move from distribution of flour in kind to a cash voucher to help families in hardship, there was suspicion that this was tantamount to abolishing the refugee issue. When UNRWA wanted to replace the tents in the 1950s for cement brick shelters, this was settlement of the refugees. Every effort that UNRWA has done to modernize the operations was met with suspicion. They first and foremost realized that UNRWA has become the reminder of this unresolved political question.

Micah Loewinger: In January, The Times of Israel quoted an anonymous senior official who opposed getting rid of UNRWA in the middle of this war. Clearly, there's some debate in the Israeli government about how this organization is beneficial to Israel, not simply a threat.

Lex Takkenberg: The military and security establishment always said, "Let's not drive it too far, UNRWA is useful." That changed with the new Israeli government. In particular, it changed after 7th October when essentially Netanyahu, and the defense establishment, and the security establishment became held hostage by these extremists in the government. The commonsense approach seems to have for now lost to the upper hand of the extremist that say, "UNRWA is a symbol of the unresolved refugee question. Let's get rid of UNRWA, then part of the problem is solved."

Micah Loewinger: Let me ask you about that, because Netanyahu has said in his day-after plan that he submitted to his war cabinet in February that he intends to see the permanent closure of UNRWA. If UNRWA were to close, what would happen to Palestinian refugees who rely on the agency outside of Gaza?

Lex Takkenberg: It's not up to Israel to decide what happens to UNRWA, but of course, UNRWA operates in cooperation with the host authorities. In Gaza and the West Bank Israel is the occupying authority. UNRWA must arrange and cooperate with them, and Israel can simply stop providing visa and work permits to international UNRWA employees. It can prevent goods from coming in and going out where necessary. It can de facto prevent UNRWA from operating.

Micah Loewinger: Netanyahu has also said he wants to replace UNRWA with a new international body.

Lex Takkenberg: Netanyahu said, let World Food Program take over those relief operations. World Food Program has no infrastructure in Gaza. It doesn't have warehouses, it doesn't have trucks, it doesn't have personnel. Netanyahu ironically said, "Well, let World Food Program ask UNRWA to send 400 of their local personnel to join World Food Program."

We have seen a number of improvised relief operations that went terribly wrong and where Israel has killed desperate people trying to get food from trucks. We have seen what happened to the World Central Kitchen a few days ago. UNRWA is the only show in town in Gaza.

Micah Loewinger: Meanwhile, the second largest aid group in Gaza, American Near East Refugee Aid announced this week that it was suspending operations after the attacks on World Central Kitchen Workers. UNRWA funding has been threatened, its operational capacity has been threatened. The alternatives to UNRWA are packing up and leaving. What can be done to alleviate starvation in Gaza?

Lex Takkenberg: By preventing UNRWA from operating, attacking World Central Kitchen, triggering ANERA and other humanitarian groups to cease operations, Israel seems to be intent on mass starvation as a further element in its ongoing genocide. We cannot interpret it in another way. A spokesperson from UNICEF was saying a couple of days, "I'm seeing in front of my eyes people who are starving and yet 12 kilometers away from me on the eastern border of Gaza, there are tens of thousands of trucks parked that in a matter of hours could resolve this crisis." That's where we are.

Micah Loewinger: Lex, thank you very much.

Lex Takkenberg: Thanks for having me.

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Micah Loewinger: Lex Takkenberg is a senior advisor at the Arab Renaissance for Democracy and Development. He formerly worked at unrwa for over three decades.

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, it's time for sports media to reckon with its gambling addiction.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media.

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Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. This weekend will mark the grand finale of College Basketball's biggest event.

News clip: ESPN, NCAA College Basketball Action.

Brooke Gladstone: The big dance, as it's known, is also the biggest in terms of money expected to change hands.

News clip: The American Gaming Association predicts an estimated $2.72 billion will be wagered on the tournaments.

News clip: An estimated 68 million Americans wagered on March Madness last year. That number is expected to soar.

Brooke Gladstone: All this because in 2018 the Supreme Court overturned the 1992 law banning state-regulated sports gambling. 38 states and counting legalized sports betting and the industry exploded. You've probably seen the ads.

News clip: You think life is short, football is short. The regular season is just 18 weeks so cherish every over and under before it's over on FanDuel.

News clip: Looking for jackpots? Right this way.

News clip: The DraftKings new sports book app. It's easy. All you have to do is download it, make a deposit, pick a sport, place a bet. Boom goes to dynamite, out comes the cash. Simple.

Brooke Gladstone: Online sports books, the standard of 21st-century bookmakers aren't the only kind of business taking advantage of the legal gambling market.

News clip: CBS sports is making a big move into sports betting.

News clip: All have media partners. DraftKings has Turner, BET MGM has Yahoo.

News clip: Starting this September, Disney is relaunching Penn's Barstool Sportsbook as ESPN Bet.

Brooke Gladstone: Almost every major national sports outlet, ESPN, The Athletic, Bleacher Report, NBC, CBS, The Ringer has partnered with at least one of the four major sports betting companies in the country, FanDuel, DraftKings, MGM, and Caesars. Big money is changing hands. What does that mean for sports journalism? On the Media producer, Rebecca Clark-Callender has that story.

Brian Moritz: There are two top-of-mind ways that I think a sports journalism gambling scandal could erupt.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: Brian Moritz is an associate professor and sports media scholar at St. Bonaventure University.

Brian Moritz: First one is like journalism insider information. When as a reporter you find out somebody's not going to play, somebody is injured. You grab your phone and there are two apps next to each other. One is Twitter, the other one is FanDuel.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: Moritz says this particular scenario is unlikely because major sports leagues are monitored constantly. An MLB or WNBA or NFL Player can't twist an ankle without everyone knowing, and a reporter would lose credibility for a gambling-first approach. Improbable but not impossible. Then there's scenario number two.

Brian Moritz: A reporter working for a media outlet that has a partnership with a sports book reporting information that directly influences a betting line.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: This actually happened just before last year's NBA draft.

Brian Moritz: One of the things that you can bet on is who is getting drafted in what position. Who goes first overall, who goes second, who goes third? What happened in the summer of 2023 was Shams Charania, he covers the NBA for the Athletic and he's one of the top insiders in this realm. He also has a partnership with FanDuel.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: Charania has 2.2 million followers on X. His ESPN counterpart, Adrian Wojnarowski has 6.3 million. NBA insiders raced to get news first, and when they tweet something, it's gospel. Moritz said when he first heard rumors about the death of Kobe Bryant, he didn't really believe it was real until Wojnarowski tweeted it. Anyways, back to Shams.

Brian Moritz: What Shams did was he tweeted out on draft night that Scoot Henderson was gaining serious momentum to go number two with the Charlotte Hornets. That went against what was the accepted wisdom. That report from Shams shifted the betting lines.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: Henderson went from an underdog to a heavy favorite for the second pick, and people bet on it because you can still make money on favorites as long as you're willing to put up big bucks. Not to mention some who gambled on other prospects going third, and then.

Announcer 2: With the second pick in the 2023 NBA draft, the Charlotte Hornets select Brandon Miller.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: Shams was accused of intentionally warping the betting lines and he was hit with a wave of criticism on YouTube and X. FanDuel had to publish a statement saying they didn't have access to Shams' reporting before he shared it.

Brian Moritz: Shams has denied this and there's never been any reporting to suggest that this was motivated by the gambling line.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: Since Shams had only said Henderson was gaining momentum, the scandal petered out, but Moritz said credibility as an insider comes down to perception. Journalists who gamble on their beat or enter partnerships with sports books are taking a risk. How sports reporters should manage the relationship with an industry so closely tied to their profession has been a question from the start.

Danny Funt: At the very first pro baseball games, there was very active, enthusiastic betting in the stands with people taking bets on whether the next pitch would be a ball or a strike, whether the wind would change directions.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: That's Danny Funt, a contributor to the Washington Post who has written extensively about the gambling world. In 2021, he penned an article for Columbia Journalism Review titled All In, Detailing the History of the Media's Relationship with Sports Betting. He says the story begins with 19th-century baseball

Danny Funt: When the National League was formed around that time, its founders were adamant that this was an opportunity to stamp out sports betting so that you could go to a game and just be a casual fan without having betting rubbed in your face.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: Despite best intentions, some 40 years later, they still hadn't eradicated the scourge. The Black Sox scandal, where eight members of the Chicago White Sox were accused of taking bribes to lose the 1919 World Series scarred major league baseball for decades, but intentionally losing games for kickbacks wasn't limited to baseball. Las Vegas started taking bets in the late 1940s. Just two years later, Max Case, sports editor of the New York Journal American won a Pulitzer for uncovering college basketball players taking bribes.

The bad press motivated Congress in the 1950s to enact a 10% tax on sports gambling revenue and in 1961 to pass the Federal Wire Act criminalizing the use of wires to place bets or share gambling information across state lines. While plenty of investigative work shone a light on gambling's dark side, media also benefited from the action.

Brian Moritz: People who gamble are like your best readers.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: Brian Moritz.

Brian Moritz: They care about everything. What is a gambler's edge? It's information.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: Studies have shown sports betters watch significantly more games than non-betters do, the kind of devoted audience a news outlet would go to any lengths to lock in. In 1976, CBS hired Jimmy the Greek Snyder for their NFL pregame show. Jimmy, a Vegas odds maker and columnist was just freshly pardoned by President Ford for a felony conviction under the Federal Wire Act. He was known to drop some not-so-subtle hints.

Jimmy Snyder: -feel about that without Darrell Green to watch Mr. Carter or to return those punts. He's a big man out of the lineup, offensively and defensively. It would make a difference of at least two points.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: Jimmy eventually got fired for making racist comments. Over on NBC, there was Pete Axthelm, who tried to split the difference between light-hearted gambling reports and darker ones.

Pete Axthelm: We've had some fun trying to pick winners, maybe even bet on them. There's a side to gambling that can be as bleak as this New York winter day outside this betting parlor.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: Mickey Charles, who wrote a gambling column for the Philadelphia Inquirer and correctly predicted the Super Bowl final score on The Today Show in 1978. He later became a broadcaster on a brand-new channel, ESPN.

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Rebecca Clark-Callender: Launched in 1979, the fledgling sports channel broadcast a gambling show from Caesars Palace during the NFL playoffs.

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Danny Funt: The exact same thing happened with HBO soon after its founding.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: Danny Funt.

Danny Funt: They were airing a show explicitly catered to sports betters.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: Newspapers, along with television, were taking notice of gambling customers. In a report released in the late '80s, an associated press survey found that between 1982 and 1984, the number of papers running betting lines jumped 20% for college football and 10% for the NFL. Altogether, three-quarters of the 125 papers surveyed had football spreads. Then in 1992, Congress flipped the table.

Dennis DeConcini: The Professional Amateur Sporting Protection Act.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: Arizona Senator Dennis DeConcini.

Dennis DeConcini: States would not be allowed to sponsor, authorize, or license sports lotteries or any other type of sports betting that is based on the outcome of professional or amateur games.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: PAPSA, as the bill was known, brought sports gambling, along with its growing presence in sports media, to an abrupt halt for nearly 30 years. Slowly, in its absence, a new business sprung up.

Albert Chen: FanDuel and DraftKings. They were two very small startup companies, one founded in the UK, one founded out of a townhouse in Boston.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: Albert Chen worked at Sports illustrated for nearly 20 years, and he's the author of Billion Dollar Fantasy: The High Stakes Game Between FanDuel and DraftKings That Upended Sports in America.

Albert Chen: They grew over a handful of years because of an absolute avalanche of advertising which caught the attention of a lot of lawmakers and prosecutors who thought, "What are these companies? They sure sound like gambling companies," when in fact these ads were about fantasy sports.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: Fantasy sports were legally classified as games of skill, not chance, meaning they escaped the regulations.

Albert Chen: By 2015, these two companies were advertising so much that on an NFL Sunday in September of 2015, there was an ad from one of these two companies on TV every 90 seconds.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: Wow.

Albert Chen: They were the biggest advertisers in America, bigger than any car company, bigger than Geico.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: DraftKings and FanDuel allowed people to put money on sports from their couches and across state lines without catching a flight to Vegas. Casinos felt unfairly restricted and left out of the profits, leading New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to bring a suit.

Reporter 10: Breaking news, the Supreme Court this morning striking down the federal ban on sports betting. Now it leaves it up to the--

Albert Chen: When that moment happens in 2018, these two companies already have a leg up. Their actual products were very good. When you're an MGM or Caesars, those are legacy casino gambling companies that have to build up infrastructure for the tech. It takes a long time and you almost have to reinvent yourself as a company.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: Reinvent they did. Everyone had an app, a casino in your pocket where the house is a computer. Now they were all competing for new features, not a neon-lit promenade or velvet-covered lounge, but micro bets, which looked a lot like what was happening in those 19th century baseball stands.

Danny Funt: It's funny. We've come full circle in letting people take bets in the stands.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: Danny Funt.

Danny Funt: Full circle and letting them bet on all sorts of ridiculous minutia whether the runner on first will try to steal second or whether this next play in a football game will be a run or a pass.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: Like the final play of this year's Super Bowl, Kansas City Chiefs are lined up eight seconds to go in overtime. They're down by three points. I can bet on whether or not the next possession results in a touchdown.

Danny Funt: Not just the biggest play of the Super Bowl, but literally every play of every game just about. It's really turning sports betting into like pulling the handle on a slot machine. Instant gratification. If betting once every few hours is addictive, imagine what betting once every few minutes is.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: Coincidentally, around the late 2010s, sports media needed cash. Between 2011 and 2017, ESPN lost nearly 13 million television subscribers as Holmes cut the cord. Time Warner parted ways with Sports Illustrated in 2017. Of course, there was 2020.

News clip: This astounding and unprecedented story continues to evolve at halftime with Adrian Wojnarowski. He has just tweeted within the past two minutes that the NBA is suspending the season.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: Media companies in need of a revenue boost found saviors in gambling companies with ad dollars to spend. Meanwhile, DraftKings is paying the Chicago Cubs $100 million over the next 10 years to open a betting parlor adjacent to Wrigley Field. FanDuel is the official betting partner of the NBA and the thin veil, broadcasters like Jimmy the Greek sat behind, dropped.

News clip: An 11-point difference which is a very significant number to a few of our friends.

News clip: A few, indeed.

News clip: Since games don't end with a 10 and a half point difference, and you know what I'm talking about.

Bomani Jones: It's one thing if we're playing a game on television or we're watching it and they're like, "Hey, you can do this, hey, if you want to gamble or whatever."

Rebecca Clark-Callender: Sports commentator Bomani Jones on CNN last month.

Bomani Jones: The crux of the broadcast now seems more and more geared toward making people gamble than it is talking about the games.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: Now, some reporters had long argued that gambling was worth coverage, like Chad Millman, former editor-in-chief of ESPN The Magazine, who established a gambling beat filled with actual reporting on the industry.

Danny Funt: He was pushing the boundaries at ESPN to take it seriously as a coverage subject. Then he broke off and helped found a site called The Action Network that provides a lot of betting analysis and content for mainstream publications across the country, all sorts of newspapers from the New York Post to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: The Action Network has contracts with sports books. When you read their content on a newspaper's website and click a link to place a bet, they and the paper receive a one-time fee for directing you there, or in some cases, they get what they call a revenue share.

Danny Funt: Which is essentially a cut of our lifetime losses betting on sports.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: Wow.

Danny Funt: You've got these outlets presenting themselves to readers as, "We're going to help you beat the sports books." Then behind the scenes, they're profiting on the money we lose betting on sports. It's something I think a lot of people, even hardcore sports fans, are oblivious to.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: When gambling companies and the media companies that are in bed with them are making money off of our losses, it's not in their best interest to address the elephant in the room.

Danny Funt: There are people who say you should never write about sports betting without saying it's an addictive product with deceptive business practices that's hurting millions of Americans' health and financial well-being. I get that. It's something I grapple with in my work.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: Something else to grapple with is that doing a deal with a betting site isn't without risk.

News clip: Sports Illustrated has laid off most of its employees. That's according to a union for the magazine's workers and the News Guild of New York.

Danny Funt: Sports Illustrated is a great example of why sports betting cash isn't a panacea. Just like ESPN, they licensed their equally storied name to a sports book. In a number of states, you could bet on the Sports Illustrated app. That wasn't enough to right the ship.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: After Funt and I spoke, Sports Illustrated's publishing rights were acquired by Israel's Minute Media. He says the magazine's woes should be a warning shot for everyone else.

Danny Funt: There's a very aggressive push to acquire customers when states legalize. In a place like North Carolina now, their airwaves are blanketed with ads. New players like Fanatics and the British company Bet365, when they enter the picture, they advertise extremely aggressively. That's going to dry up and they're going to want to be profitable before too long and be a little stingier with their advertising dollars.

Brian Moritz: Gambling gets legalized, it becomes accessible. Money floods the market. There's a lot of genuine interest about it. All right, cool.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: Brian Moritz.

Brian Moritz: Now let's take a breath. Let's start putting up our walls here. It comes back to the audience and making sure that when we report something about their favorite team, they can trust that it's being reported to them, not to get them to bet on it, but to inform them. I think framing all of our ethical guidelines from that perspective, that's the path forward for sports journalism.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: Without that, sports media is gambling with its own reputation with its journalists and with consumers' money. Who knows, maybe it will all work out, but rule one of sitting down at any table is never bet more than you're willing to lose. For On the Media, I'm Becca Clark-Callender.

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Micah Loewinger: That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Eloise Blondiau, Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, and Candice Wang, with help from Shaan Merchant.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineers this week are Andrew Nerviano and Brendan Dalton. Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

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