The Daily Show brawls over online fantasy sports versus the evils of Wall Street
On Thursday, Nevada regulators decided that online daily fantasy sports sites like DraftKings and FanDuel are more like gambling than a game of skill and ordered them shut down in the state. It was the most recent and biggest setback for the multibillion-dollar unregulated industry being investigated by federal and state governments over allegations that employees of the sites unlawfully exploited paying customers by using insider information. On Thursday's Daily Show, Trevor Noah unpacked the controversy, explained why these sites are even legal, and especially examined the similarities between online fantasy sports and Wall Street malfeasance.
First Noah compared the sites to drugs, noting — after spoiling the ending of Breaking Bad — that "just like meth, these fantasy sports sites are popular, addictive, and getting unwanted attention from the law." He played skeptical about the Wall Street-DraftKings comparison at first, until he had three persuasive examples of the similarities (for the three strikes in football, he joked, playing up his foreignness). "That's crazy," he finally concluded: "Online fantasy sports betting is an unregulated marketplace that seems to be screwing everyday Americans out of their hard-earned money."
Before Noah could definitely tie that to Wall Street, though, Senior Fantasy Sports Correspondent Jordan Klepper came on to plead the positive case for fantasy sports, then, when Noah wasn't convinced, tried out a truth-in-advertising version of DraftKing's ubiquitous ads. Watch below. Peter Weber
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