"Whitty, what's good?" Of course, tediously trivial British political hacks are now obsessed with Nicki Minaj...
The day Laura Kuenssberg was sent to the burns unit and the true emptiness of British political reporting was revealed once again.
I’m the victim of a paradox of my own making today: I’m going to complain about journalists going on about something while myself going on about that thing. It’s the sort of meta-hypocrisy that this newsletter specialises in, so let’s just accept that and move on to the matter in hand: “Chris Whitty vs. Nicki Minaj”/”Minaj vs. Kuenssberg”/the howling void at the heart of British political reporting.
The ‘row’ between esteemed battle rapper Professor Chris Whitty and his hype man Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Nicki Minaj did not occur organically, though some of the reporting makes it sound like it did. Instead during a press conference yesterday about the government’s ‘winter plan for Covid’, Steven Swinford, The Times' deputy political editor, dedicated the first of his three questions to asking England’s Chief Medical Officer about this tweet:
Without reference to other tweets where Minaj says she will get vaccinated, supportedly quote tweeted fans who have been vaccinated noting that having no severe side-effects is the norm, and put up a poll asking her followers to tell her what vaccine they got, Swinford asked:
Professor Whitty, one of the world’s biggest female celebrities, Nicki Minaj, has today publicly linked the coronavirus vaccine to impotence. Now she’s got 8 million followers on Twitter, many of them are young people, young people you’re suggesting should get vaccinated, what would you say to them? And how concerned are you by public comments like that from public figures?
Whitty’s answer was detailed, calm, and serious…
So, there are number of myths that fly around, some of which are clearly ridiculous, some of which are clearly designed just to scare. That happens to be one of them, that is untrue.
My own strong suggestion, if I may, to media present and not present, is repeating them in public just gives them credence which they don’t need, they’re untrue — full stop… if you think about where we actually are overall, the great majority of people are getting vaccinated, the great majority of people are ignoring these myths. And if you talk about people in their fifties, sixties and seventies, over 90% of people are getting vaccinated. Very few people are actively in the anti-vax group.
There are a group of people who’ve got strange beliefs and fine, and they make their own choices, and in a sense, also fine. People are adults who are allowed to make their own choices, however strange, that is a basic principle of medical ethics, actually. But there are also people who go around trying to discourage other people from taking a vaccine that could be life-saving or prevent them from having life-changing injuries to themselves. And many of those people, I regret to say, I think know that they are peddling untruths, but they still do it. In my view, I think they should be ashamed.
… but it’s become a “spat” in the words of The Independent’s headline, an “attack” on Minaj by Whitty according to PoliticsHome, and in the framing of many stories a situation where Whitty individually singled Minaj out to say she “should be ashamed”.
But it was Swinford who brought up the ridiculous tweet, stripped of any other context, and suggested that it might lead young people — “Won’t somebody think of the children!” — not to get the vaccine.
The key part of Whitty’s answer was not his general comment that people who encourage others to not get vaccinated “should be ashamed” but his entreaty to the media — in the room and out of it — not to repeat vaccine myths because it “just gives them credence which they don’t need.”
And it’s the part about not repeating virus myths that reporters have resolutely ignored, focusing instead on Minaj’s response to Whitty and Johnson (who muttered that he is “not as familiar with the works of Nicki Minaj as I probably should be…”) Similarly the stories delighting in this artificial beef between one of the world’s biggest rappers and one of its most modest chief medical officers put little focus on Whitty saying that very few people are anti-vaxxers and that “the great majority of people are ignoring these myths.”
Minaj’s ‘space hopper balls’ tweet is ludicrous and potentially dangerous if encountered by total idiots1 but the media has vastly increased its reach while separating it from the singer’s other statements. That results in the myth getting far more attention than it otherwise would. And lines like this one from The Independent…
Boris Johnson and Chris Whitty were involved in a bizarre war of words with the rapper Nicki Minaj on Tuesday after she claimed that her cousin’s friend was rendered “impotent” after having the Covid-19 vaccine.
… are a great example of how the media erases itself from stories it triggered.
Minaj only became part of the press conference last night because Swinford elevated her tweet into an issue worthy of discussing with the Prime Minister and Chief Medical Officer in an attempt to get an “influencers are poisoning our children story”. If your children are likely to look to Nicki Minaj (or any one of her many personas) for medical advice, you’ve already failed them.
Minaj pulling out the British accent2 she used for one of her alter-egos (Martha Zolanski, the mother of another character, Roman, who she’s called “the lunatic boy who lives inside me”) to mock Boris Johnson brought her into contact with another ludicrous public performer: the BBC’s Political Editor, Laura Kuenssberg3.
Despite Minaj’s obvious sarcasm — in the audio clip she says she “went to Oxford” and “to school with Margaret Thatcher” — Kuenssberg quote tweeted her with the words “2021 everyone…” It prompted such a bodying from Minaj that I seriously considered shutting this newsletter forever, the pinnacle of British media criticism having been achieved in a single tweet:
Yes, 2021 when jackasses hang on to my every tweet but can’t decipher sarcasm & humor, and can’t read. Go away dumbo.
But beyond the accidental hilarity of Kuenssberg failing to realise that Minaj would bite back harder than the average backbencher or a distraught father outed as a Labour supporter (remember “this is him here”?), there’s more to this story. It reveals once again how desperate Britain’s political journalists (and hacks worldwide, actually) are to focus on trivia rather than substance.
Swinford — who curiously hasn’t written up a Minaj story though his question prompted the ‘row’ — was fishing for a controversial quote by throwing the rapper’s tweet into the middle of the press conference. His other queries — about working from home and the prospect of a cabinet reshuffle — were marginally more serious but it was Minaj’s words that he decided to lead on.
Newspapers have a taste for stories about influencers and the ‘dangers’ of social media in part because both are their enemies. The fact that celebrities can reach vast audiences — The Times has a daily circulation of around 400,000 (and 1.5 million Twitter followers) while Minaj has 8 million Twitter followers and 157 million followers on Instagram — is galling to the old media, especially journalists who never got to write in an era where they could be the mediators of every story.
But the idea that Minaj’s tweets or Instagram posts will shift the behaviour of her fans is freighted with assumption. Swinford fretted that “many” of Minaj’s Twitter followers are young people but most young people aren’t on Twitter and any that are would be highly likely to miss that individual tweet in the endless rush of their timelines. If they did see it, I doubt many of them would consider Minaj a credible source on vaccines.
Minaj had a huge hit with Starships, but her fans don’t look to her for policy positions on NASA, nor does the fact that she dropped Anaconda mean they’d look to her for medical advice if they got a snake bite. It suits journalists to pretend that young people are easily bamboozled but it bears no relation to reality. Generations that have been online for their whole lives are far better at separating facts from bullshit than their Facebook-meme-believing elders.
British political journalists have leapt on Minaj colliding with Whitty and Johnson because while they treat the parade of grey mediocrities that make up our politics like celebrities they’re really excited when a real one rocks up. For the Lobby, which breathlessly recounts gossip about even the most banal of backbenchers, one of the world’s biggest rappers being vaguely aware of Chris Whitty is like Christmas come early.
But this is just another symptom of how broken British media (and media more widely) has become. One tweet by Nicki Minaj is stripped of any other context, put to a public health official — who really has better things to think about — then, despite his advice not to amplify myths, repeated in story after story along with a distorted quote that turns a general warning against people peddling myths into a personal diss.
Chris Whitty carefully avoided attacking Minaj personally — in part because, as a 55-year-old white guy, he doesn’t really know much about her — and yet The Sun, like many other publications, crows that he “slammed” her. If you didn’t watch the press conference, you’d imagine that Whitty, unprompted and pumped up to promote his next mixtape (“You’re listening to Chris Whitty, the ice-cold medical officer from the big bad city…”) launched an attack on Minaj for the clout and the chance to drop a Fire In The Booth4.
Across the rest of this week, the Whitty vs. Minaj meme will get twisted and reused by columnists, each mention moving further and further from the truth towards a set of easy one-liners.
It won’t matter to Minaj, but it should matter to us. We should expect hacks like Swinford, who are given access to big press conferences and the opportunity to ask serious questions of our leaders, to take that responsibility more seriously. What was the Minaj query but an attempt to get just the kind of cheap and easy story that every newspaper has pumped out today?
But then, what do I expect, the British media is a monster and that’s what a motherfucking monster do…
We should probably be more concerned that ‘news’ personalities in the US and podcasters like Joe Rogan are promoting horse paste as a Covid cure.
Hacks otherwise unfamiliar with Minaj have been baffled by the accent as if Google isn’t available.
Piers Morgan also got involved but who has the time?
I had to link Akala’s Fire In The Booth. It’s very much worth the watch.