Lottery advertisements continue their attack on regular news aggregates
I get annoyed with the lottery because I believe it is just another way of taking advantage of the poor. I know of not a single successful person that plays that lottery out of any sense other than a gag or a birthday gift for someone that they have no idea what else they could get them. The old Norm MacDonald joke about giving someone a birthday lottery ticket goes "here you go, it's NOTHING!" because almost all of the time that is exactly what a lottery ticket is. You are pissing money into the wind and the only people I know that play it are people who don't have anything in the way of savings and are probably going to live off of Social Security when they are too old to work.
It is a fool's game and if anyone other than the government themselves were administering this game of chance, it would be banned.
Yet not only is this game allowed in almost all places in the USA, the government can advertise it freely and without much in the way of disclosing how infinitesimally small your chances are of actually winning.
Lately I have noticed that these adverts disguised as news have been making their way into news aggregate sites and I suppose that shouldn't surprise me since those bastards have been horrible for a long time now.
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I go to Yahoo News every now and then not to get any real information but to see how far we have fallen in the news world and how these remaining agencies are doing anything they can to remain afloat ever since newspapers stopped being something that people were willing to pay for. The subscriber model doesn't really work that well in the online world so these papers-turned-online-providers are probably really struggling for income and now they are throwing advertisements for lottery into the mix disguised as news.
It used to just be fringe outlets that were doing this but now we have USA Today which was a big deal when I was a teen and in college, but is basically a nothing news outlet today. Still, it is surprising to see them get prominent positioning on the news chart and while I should expect this, the fact that the article is labeled as "sports" is just embarrassing.
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In the "article" they show only the people who have won and feature all the huge payouts that have happened in the past. They talk about a very vague "recent winner" in Ohio who is not named and with just a cursory search I couldn't find anything matching what they were talking about. I suspect these winners are simply made up individuals and it maybe didn't even happen. It's not like the kind of person who plays the Mega Millions is going to verify that this information is actually correct.
Nowhere in the article is there any mention of the odds of winning, nor any sort of warning or phone numbers about gambling addiction which would be required if this was a private business. The other day I was listening to a podcast and an advert for a sport gambling app came on that was about 30 seconds long and was followed by 5 minutes of government-forced warnings, odds, disclaimers, and phone numbers and websites that you can go to if you have a gambling problem.
These articles apparently are not subjected to the same regulation. It's been a while since I went to school for journalism but there was a topic that we spoke of back then about how opinion columns are not subject to the same scrutiny that advertisements are and this is perhaps why we are seeing these lottery things invade the regular part of the news rather than being labeled as an ad.
I just find it particularly devious that the government goes this route when they would definitely take issue if a casino or someone like Draft Kings did the same thing. They would definitely sue and fine them for so much as attempting such a thing.
Rules for thee! Not for me!
In this article there was a "more in sports" section at the bottom and as is the case often on Yahoo, the comments section has been disabled so that people like me can't go in there and decry this organization for helping to dupe the most vulnerable people in society into losing what little money they have on a pipe dream.
Fernando Cervantes Jr is the author of this article, and he looks like he is a teenager. The article in question also reads as if it definitely wasn't written by an actual human. I'm not going to come down too hard on Fernando, he is just trying to make it in a dying industry that is reaching for anything it possibly can to stay afloat for another couple of years.
Don't play the lottery ya'll, it's a foolish thing and it should be no surprise that the media is helping to muddy the waters on this topic. For every success story that is often quite fabricated, there are thousands of stories of people throwing away money on something they never win. Even the winning stories normally have bad endings. It is a well-documented fact that over 70% of all lottery winners lose all or most of their winnings within 5 years as well and I wonder why? Could it be that the sort of people who play the lottery don't have great financial sense? Methinks this is the case!
