Media portrayal of sports betting in Canada before and after Federal Bill C-218
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2021, Federal Bill C-218 allowed the legalization of single-event sports betting in Canada. The rationale and repercussions of Bill C-218 received substantial media coverage. We sought to characterize the themes and voices that were present in Canadian newspaper coverage of sports betting, using the Canadian Newsstream database to identify print articles published in two time periods, before (Jan 2020–June 2021) and after (July 2021–Dec 2022) the bill was passed. We coded articles for seven main themes, associated subthemes, and voices. In 146 articles, dominant themes were Legality (85.6%) and Industry Change (83.6%). Although Technology (52.7%) was well represented, discussion of In-Play Betting as a subtheme was coded in only 21.9% of articles. Gambling Harm and Reform were less represented, in less than a quarter of articles. In terms of voices, Industry representatives (70.5%) were most frequent. Few articles featured voices of Academics, Treatment Providers/NGOs, and people with Lived Experience of gambling harms. We argue that the Canadian media coverage of the legalization of sports betting has emphasized the corporate and economic impacts, with less attention to the risks of harm associated with the expansion of sports betting, and changes to the underlying gambling product.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".