’Tis the season to make predictions, and media outlets will shortly be trying to foretell how the trends that shape our world will play out in 2026. As an attempt to brace for whatever fresh hell the new year will bring, this is fair enough. But journalists are not prophets, and at present the future is intruding too much into what counts as “news”.
Earlier this month, for instance, the US news network CNN announced a partnership with a fast-growing company called Kalshi. This is a particularly successful specimen of a burgeoning species: the regulated “prediction market”. Here, you can make bets (sorry, “trade event contracts”) based on what you think is going to happen – in the economy, politics, sport, entertainment, even the weather. The difference from traditional gambling is that the odds (sorry, “market prices”) are crowdsourced. They emerge from what everyone laying down their cash reckons about, say, how fast measles will spread. This collective guesswork will now be informing CNN’s journalism – and that of the business news channel CNBC, which has made similar-sounding arrangements. Its president predicts that prediction market data will “help people stay better informed about the world around them”. But how, exactly?
These deals mark a further spike in the dubious enthusiasm for trying to report events that haven’t yet happened, in headlines that hinge on words like “could”. Reporting on probabilities means you’re liberated from the hassle of grounding your claims on hard evidence. It clears the way for stories that read like press releases, insisting that something is “set to” happen. This might make life easier for hard-pressed newsrooms, but it has costs for the rest of us. Too much of the 2024 election campaign coverage focused on polling, rather than much-needed policy debate – part of the tendency to report politics as though it were a horse race. And when AI wizards make grandiose promises, they’re often treated as news – regardless of the fact investors can make a lot of money from price-inflating hype.
Probabilities liberate the hassle of grounding your claims on hard evidence
Objective reporting of risk – like the chances that all that hype will trigger a crash – is clearly worthwhile, but it can easily slip into licensing editors to pick whichever scenarios match their worldview. When Labour set about ending private schools’ VAT exemption, for example, a deluge of doom-laden prophecies filled the rightwing press. The Daily Mail warned that “one in five private schools could shut within three years” – standing up that “could” with some research by an accountancy firm. So far, nothing remotely on that scale has ensued. We will have to see if this flop discourages editors from taking a similar approach in future.
Kalshi, which is advised by Donald Trump Jr, would doubtless say that its approach is driven by the wisdom of crowds, not editors’ slanted guesswork. But using prediction markets to inform journalism offers new possibilities for skewing the news. In 2021, we saw how a push coordinated on social media had a huge impact on the stock price of the US company GameStop. Today, Kalshi offers the chance to bet on such things as who Trump will pardon, or fire. Connecting the site to a news network opens up the temptation to try to move Kalshi’s odds in order to affect what CNN reports on. Even without any orchestration, it risks generating self-fulfilling prophecies, where people deciding that something might happen makes it more likely, by making that expectation a “story” with momentum behind it.
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The company’s co-founder, Tarek Mansour, says its “long-term vision is to financialise everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion”, optimistic that this can “resolve differences of opinion on anything”. But this isn’t the first time tech innovators have predicted that gamification – attaching competitive scoring systems to ever more aspects of life – will make the world a happier place. The creator of Facebook’s “like” button, for instance, thought he was encouraging positivity, not crafting a polarisation ratchet. Business Insider predicts: “News organisations like CNBC could see engagement rise if viewers and readers connect to prediction data as a way to gamify news.” Which would be great for CNBC, but the idea that turning news stories into bets is going to lead us to a consensus is not exactly a dead cert.
Underlying all this is our hyper-caffeinated culture of second-guessing, constantly trying to game things three moves ahead – visible, too, in the way that government structures itself around announcing promises rather than achievements. What we need is neither guesswork nor gamified news, but reporting that makes sense of what is happening already. The CNN-Kalshi hook-up at least crystallises the problem – but, according to the New Yorker, it “could foreshadow a deluge of similar deals”. So perhaps CNN will soon be reporting on how Kalshi users are betting on that.
Phil Tinline is the author of The Death of Consensus: 100 Years of British Political Nightmares and Ghosts of Iron Mountain: The Hoax that Duped America and its Sinister Legacy
Photograph by Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images