Newsweek Article Criticizing Online Gambling Swings and Misses

A Newsweek article has attacked online gambling. With a header reading, “How Washington Opened the Floodgates to Online Poker, Dealing Parents a Bad Hand,” the cover article (shown above) pictures a sad-faced young boy holding up a tablet displaying a poker hand, broken-hearted and inconsolable from his loss of innocence, robbed by online poker.

Wire Act Criticised

The piece criticises the Department of Justice’s (DoJ) Office of Legal Counsel and the legal opinion of employee Virginia Seitz, which led to reinterpretation of the Wire Act and as Newsweek claims “opened wide the door to online gambling, and … may have opened a Pandora’s box,” by offering so-called “slots for tots.”

The upshoot is that the increasingly biased and overly dramatic Newsweek magazine ultimately contains many inaccuracies, one-sided views and oversimplifications of the complex gaming law which has enabled consideration of the reintroduction of gaming to the US population.

Reporting Oversights

The most egregious oversight is the failure by the writer to draw the distinction between regulated and unregulated online gambling in America, which is of course the crux of the legal basis for introduction of online gambling in a productive and socially as well as legally acceptable form.

Silly and transparent scare tactic statements that overdramatize the situation are ones such as the following, “This is just the beginning,” (US Sen.) Chaffetz, who has called for a federal ban on online gambling, tells Goodman. “I am afraid that if we don’t move quickly and get some decent regulations in place, which we really don’t have right now, it will be too late to stop it from reaching all the states.”

Online gambling of course cannot reach any states unless it is regulated; online gambling is only possible in three states right now - Nevada, New Jersey, and Delaware - and all of these states have strict security, age and identity verification requirements which are first and foremost concerned with protecting minors and confirming users are of age to play. Sufficient regulation is in fact the biggest obstacle to legalizing online gambling in any state.

Commenters Recognise the Ruse

Ultimately, if one views the critical comments following the piece, the article really does fail to come across as impartial or accurate, reflecting more on Newsweek's feebleness of reportage than any actual evidence of genuine threat to our nation's youth.