With the jackpot for the drawing to be held Saturday night now estimated at $1.5 billion, Powerball fever is back. And once again, we’ll see local television news organizations hyping this fool’s game of chance with what amounts to millions of dollars of free advertising in order to draw viewers.
The same local news operations whose anchors and reporters host charity events to help those in need lend their platforms to a lottery that preys on the poor and sends the false message that a windfall of cash — rather than the satisfaction of lifetime achievement — is the secret to happiness.
“Someone may have a very Happy Halloween”, intoned a smiling local CBS2 News anchor, while noting, in passing, that the odds of winning were 1 in 300 million. His enthusiasm is typical.
It’s time for local news to stop this free advertising.
As it stands, they are encouraging those without much money to waste their scarce dollars. Overall, Americans spend a staggering $105 billion in lottery chances every year. Some 28% of Americans earning less than $30,000 buy tickets every week — and spend some $412 a year in doing so. This in a country where a quarter of households lack any emergency savings.
As Jonathan Cohen has written in his new book, “For a Dollar and a Dream: State Lotteries in Modern America,” “The frequency of play, and the amount bet by those who do gamble is particularly high among low-income, nonwhite and less educated Americans.”
It’s their right, of course, to choose this form of entertainment, just as it’s someone’s right to spend their money on beer and cigarettes. But without advertising and promotion, lottery participation falls off. New York State alone spends $74 million a year on lottery ads. That’s no reason for television news to join the party by including Powerball results as part of their actual newscasts.
This is an immense promotional giveaway. Local TV news advertising takes in some $18 billion a year — and New York, in particular, is an especially lucrative local market; ad rates here are second only to in metro Los Angeles. Sixty seconds of purely promotional airtime can be, in effect, a six-figure ad buy.
The same local news operations that hype Powerball go out of their way to associate themselves with causes deemed to help the disadvantaged. WCBS Radio, for instance, broadcasts an annual “Hungerthon” to raise $1 million to reduce hunger by supporting various organizations. It urges that we “Take action to help nourish people in immediate need and address the underlying issues at the root of hunger.” Here’s one idea: discouraging fruitless gambling by not promoting it on air.
There is a broader issue involved here. As Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute, the author of “Men Without Work,” has powerfully pointed out, we are suffering from an ongoing decline in the workforce participation rate of working-age men. There are, he reports, some four times as many prime working-age men (25 to 34) who have simply dropped out of the workforce as there are those formally unemployed and looking for work.
In part, this is the result of ongoing and increasing forms of public assistance with no work requirement — such as food stamps. But the allure attached to lotteries sends a strong signal: There’s a shot at happiness that doesn’t involve work and, if you’re lucky, you’ll never have to work again. One New York State lottery campaign dubbed “How Would You Spend It?” gets to the heart of the matter.
Rather than encouraging lottery sales, public service advertising would better promote the fact that we face a labor shortage, that jobs are available — and that work and supporting one’s family is the true route to happiness.
Husock is a senior fellow in domestic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
