Why are we still listening to Kanye West?

There’s a lot going on in the world right now. Ukraine is under constant assault by Russian missiles. America’s midterms are around the corner, with too many vital issues to count hanging in the balance. Covid experts are sounding the alarm on winter surges with variants that evade immunity. A bird flu outbreak is wreaking havoc on the US poultry industry, even affecting beloved TikTok star Emmanuel the emu.

Whether or not you’ve kept up to date on those topics, there’s another one that’s been basically inescapable: Kanye West. The artist and former husband of Kim Kardashian, now going by Ye, upped his long-running streak of controversies in recent weeks with a spate of antisemitic comments, resulting in bans by both Instagram and Twitter.

And yet, we continue to hear (too much) from him through interview after interview. In each one, he seems to dig himself further into a pit of disgrace. In his perhaps most notorious interview, Fox News’s Tucker Carlson sought to portray West as a level-headed figure under unfair attack for wearing a “White Lives Matter” shirt at Paris Fashion Week. The part of the interview that grabbed the most attention never made it to air on Fox News but was instead revealed by Vice, featuring a torrent of West’s antisemitic views.

This week, West took his comments even further in appearances on the YouTube show Drink Champs and Chris Cuomo’s NewsNation programme. Cuomo, for his part, worked hard to shut West down during a prolonged rant, but not before the new damage was done. In yet another sit-down on Wednesday, this time with Piers Morgan, West confusingly apologised for causing “hurt and confusion” while simultaneously saying, when asked if he regrets his antisemitic remarks, “absolutely not”. Meanwhile outside of the television realm, there was the news that West is gearing up to purchase the right-wing social media app Parler, promising to bring us even more of his reprehensible noise.

I find myself asking the question: why do we keep listening to Kanye West? No doubt it is our job as journalists to ensure powerful voices don’t go unchecked, to call out their lies and the damage they cause. As West puts forth falsehood after falsehood about Jewish people, George Floyd and others – which I will not repeat here – we have a duty to hold him accountable and explain the consequences of his words to our readers.

And beyond just West, we have a duty to lift a lid on the broader context in which those comments are made, as my colleague Noah Berlatsky did in this piece about the GOP’s embrace of antisemitism last week. But each time a new outrage-inducing line emerges, I wonder at what point we are doing more harm than good by giving West’s vitriol oxygen through our reporting?

That’s a question I will continue to keep top of mind as this particularly miserable saga inevitably drags on.

Yours,

Megan Sheets

US news editor