Why are we still listening to Kanye West?

Each time a new outrage-inducing line from Kanye West emerges, I wonder at what point we are doing more harm than good by giving his vitriol oxygen through our reporting, writes Megan Sheets

In each interview, he seems to dig himself further into a pit of disgrace (Reuters)

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.