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Home – Virginia Politics & News – Gaming the System

I had a personal friend lose his job programming a popular radio station and have to leave the United States in order to keep working because a record company representative took him to a New York Yankees game.

The New York state attorney general decided that crime was so well under control in the state that he made it his mission to round up this cabal of inappropriate influence over popular music, and he started by going after gifts to radio station programmers, not for future consideration.

Alan Freed had blown that business up in the ‘50s by thanking them for records that they had already played. “Plugola,” they called it, and the few radio announcers that corporate America still employs are made to sign a legal document promising not to do it and ceding any legal protection if they are caught.

I tell you this story because, here in Virginia’s General Assembly 2026 session, a bill was introduced to regulate online gaming. HB 161 would have set up the business of online gambling under the regulation of the Virginia Lottery Commission, with the effect of building toward the establishment of a state gaming commission.

The bill was supported vigorously by the Sports Betting Alliance, a 501(c)(6) nonprofit trade association that represents........

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