‘Stimulating a rich and enduring dialogue’: Here’s how big gambling interests control the PR about harm

This article is an instalment in a new series, Punted, on the government’s failure to reform gambling advertising.

At a 1996 meeting of gaming industry executives in Las Vegas, Frank Fahrenkopf, a former Republican National Party chairman who had recently become president of the American Gaming Association (AGA), set out the defence the industry would use against growing threats to its social license, and thus its expansion.

“Our industry cannot afford to make the mistake made by the tobacco industry,” he said. Rather than deny that gambling addiction existed, as tobacco industry figures had with nicotine, he told his colleagues that the gaming industry must not only concede there was such a thing as problem gambling, but that it must lead the discussion around it.