This is not a story about Taylor Swift and the Super Bowl

livemint.com:

Taylor Swift. It is possibly something more ridiculous, a column about all the columns about Taylor Swift. And yet attention must be paid, because so much attention is being paid.

That is the ineluctable logic of the media-politics complex, a philosophical school of which Donald Trump is the American Aristotle. Ms Swift is no slouch, either. Any news organisation would be deceiving readers about the reality of American life by ignoring the national convulsion over the relationship between Ms Swift and Travis Kelce, a tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs, an American-football team competing in the Super Bowl on February 11th.

And yet any news organisation must also reckon with the complexity that this reality has its basis in unreality, not in fact-free lies about a stolen election but in fact-free speculation about whether the romance is a real love affair, or a cross-branding triumph by two marketing savants, or, darker yet, a “psychological operation" hatched by the Pentagon to re-elect President Joe Biden. (The Pentagon has denied this.) Having described that basic background, your news organisation approaches a fork in the road. Down one route lies further credulous or cynical conspiracy theorising.

This is the route chosen by some stars of Fox News. Down the other, news organisations can poke at those who traffic in conspiracies while not ruling out the cross-branding theory, and speculating about if and with what effect Ms Swift might endorse Mr Biden, as she did in 2020. As these news organisations intensify and prolong the attention to the artist and the athlete, they are doing their jobs: they are covering what has come to be defined as news.