I don't think ESPN should not offer gambling b/c the already cover sports. By them offering gambling now, they're now able to influence the coverage any way they feel they can, with one sole purpose: increase profits. In effect, it's not about the truth or what's really happening anymore: it's about how they want people to see things.
Here's an example:
Say it's Friday night, ESPN is broadcasting back to back NBA games, ~4:00PM and 7:00PM Pacific. ESPN doesnt release stats on the betting handles, i.e. the action/bets they take on each team for the games. How do we know if ESPN Bet takes more bets on one team, they won't fudge the lines so the action is more balanced and they just benefit by swallowing up all the juice? Say the line is Lakers -5 (all Lakers are healthy and playing), at home vs DEN (Jamal Murray is out for rest for whatever reason, non injury related; nothing against Jamal Murray, just an example). If the public is slamming the Lakers at -5 b/c Jamal Murray is out, ESPN BET can just up the line to Lakers -7, -8 to get more people to bet on DEN (they can also juke the lines to make it look like the public is slamming the Lakers to get you to bet that way). Why would they do that? If the bets are somehow more even, ESPN BET wins! How do they win? They collect all the juice! They reduce their risk by evening out the bets on both sides. I DO NOT TRUST ESPN TO LOOK OUT FOR THE PUBLIC! Everything they do is about money, extracting max value.. they do not give an F about gamblers or the sports fans. They can use their platforms to entice gamblers to bet any way they feel they can benefit or extract max value. It's not really about reporting truths, etc. Why do you think they came up with all these nonsense segments to entice you to bet a certain way? "Stephen's A-List", "Seeing Green", etc.. these segments are nonsense because they don't care if they're right or wrong or they actually believe the bet will win.. how do we know there's no other motive behind this? They don't care if the bet wins... why would you take gambling advice or a hunch from people that don't gamble or care about the outcome? I think people would take them more seriously if they actually bet on something.. have something at risk.
I feel like ESPN should offer gambling OR stick to sports coverage; they shouldn't be allowed to do both. ESPN has already proven they don't care about the fans with all these nonsense extended commercial breaks, falsely advertising start times for their games to get people to watch the ads (they'll show start time as 4:00 PM but when you flip the game on, they're doing a pregame show with mostly ads), coming back to the sports programming late b/c they're trying to jam in the last ad before the game starts again, etc. All their decisions are money driven; they haven't done one thing for the sports fan (the people that actually drive the system they're benefitting from).