April 30, 2012
Good gambling, bad gambling
The recent Sky City stories illustrate an interesting division in media reports of gambling
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
My guess is that the difference reflects the preconception that pokies are addictive, while lottery tickets aren’t. I don’t know how true it is, but I have never heard of someone transfixed with lotto tickets. Anyway, I’m not against either of these gambling options.
13 years ago
Sorry, with my cynical hat on, I suspect much of this is because Lottery stories are based on publicity from the lottery company, who just want to give the media an excuse to put ‘chance’ ‘win’ ‘lot of money’ in a headline, whereas the recent run of stories about pokies have been generated by people who want to suggest wrong-doing.
13 years ago
That’s pretty much what I think, too. It doesn’t contradict Luis’ explanation, though.
Since lots of people believe (with some reason) that poker machines have bad effects, they will push bad-pokie stories, and the operators will try to keep quiet so as not to stir up problems. Conversely, since people don’t worry about the Lotto, the operators can push lots of fluff stories about winners.
I was just struck by how complete the dichotomy seems to be.
13 years ago