Fox is the latest to add prediction markets as a new ‘data layer’ for news coverage
Fox Corporation has announced plans to partner with Kalshi to integrate the prediction market’s data across the media giant’s various cable networks.
Tuesday’s announcement follows the rise in popularity of prediction markets, and marks Kalshi’s third partnership with a large media corporation, with similar deals struck with CNBC and CNN in December of last year.
Kalshi’s platform allows users to bet on current events, anything from sports betting to politics. For instance, users can bet on who will win an election. From those wagers, a forecast is determined based on the crowd’s opinion.
Not everyone is turning to the platform to bet.
“Roughly 70% of people who visit Kalshi use the site to check market odds, while just 30% of people use it to trade,” a press release announcing the collaboration said. “By providing another data point to supplement reporting, Kalshi is quickly becoming an additional way for people to understand and follow current events.”
Kalshi’s forecasts are set to be integrated into Fox News Channel, Fox Business Network, Fox Weather and the Fox One streaming platform. According to the announcement, Kalshi will also work with data and production team at Fox, providing real-time access to data for data visualizations.
“More people are watching Kalshi’s forecasts than trading them, which says a lot: our data effectively complements news and polls,” Tarek Mansour, co-founder and CEO of Kalshi said in a press release. “As misinformation grows more common, Kalshi offers accurate, unbiased data to help people better understand what’s going on in the world.”
Fox News will not be using the prediction market’s data for political coverage, the company confirmed to Fast Company.
The prediction market’s forecasts have become increasingly popular and valuable predictors. A recent study by the Federal Reserve found that “Kalshi markets provide a high-frequency, continuously updated, distributionally rich benchmark that is valuable to both researchers and policymakers.”
Still, many remain skeptical on the impact prediction markets may have on the public, with some even reffering the trend as the “depravity economy.”
“Markets may offer a snapshot of public sentiment on certain topics or trends, but there’s a host of reasons why relying on them as a data source is tricky,” journalist Klaudia Jaźwińska argues in the Columbia Journalism Review.
She adds, “Participants are not demographically representative, markets are vulnerable to manipulation, they financialize devastating events—inviting speculation on war, political instability, and suffering, which can undermine public trust.”