There is a general feeling on the part of the online poker industry that the mainstream media is the main enemy of online poker when it comes to its expansion into places such as the United States where the legislative assembly is largely hostile to the idea. Mainstream media types have the power to affect public policy in a very real way through the news they decide to cover and because of that the mainstream media decision to only cover negative stories in relation to online poker has really hurt the popularity of the industry within the United States and other countries that are hostile to online poker.
That having been said however, there is a major challenge to this way of looking at online poker and it comes from a place within the industry that one might not expect it to come from. This place is the sports media and through their coverage of events dealing with poker, they have largely dispelled a lot of the mainstream media crusade against online poker by showcasing it as just another sporting event within a country that is already obsessed over how sports happen to work.
The punch line for this way of doing things is actually quite simple. Say for example that the mainstream media runs a story that a kid threw himself from the top of a building and committed suicide because he had lost all of his college tuition money playing poker online. The mainstream media angle almost without fail will be that online poker is hazardous to the community because all students are at risk of this happening to them. When a person sees that report, they might be horrified, but if they turn over to a sportscast of a poker tournament and see a bunch of normal people without gambling problems playing, they might end up getting confused in light of the conflicting pieces of coverage they are getting from the sports media and the mainstream media. Indeed, one could hardly blame them for being in a state of confusion after that happened.
And this is the state in which news coverage within the United States and many other anti-online gambling countries happens to reside. The mainstream media has a decidedly negative way of covering online gambling while the sports media has a decidedly normalized feel to it when it broadcasts the same events to millions of people around the country. With that type of battle going on and politicians being forced to respond to both sides of it, one can perhaps understand why policy towards online poker in places like the United States is as disjointed as it currently happens to be. This current situation shows no signs of ending and that is why the battle over online poker has probably only just begun.
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