What can we learn from RFK's 'erotic poetry'? That Americans need to get better at enjoying a scandal | Marina Hyde

The US health secretary's digital affair' with Olivia Nuzzi doesn't need sombre analysis. Take it from this Brit: sometimes laughter is the only option

Literally nothing on this earth takes itself as seriously as American journalism. There are rogue-state dictators it's more permissible to laugh at than the endlessly hilarious pretensions of newsmen and newswomen in the United States. The crucial difference between the British press and US press is that at least we in the British press know we're in the gutter. The Americans have always imagined - and so loudly - that they are involved in some kind of higher calling. Guys, I love you and stuff, but get over it, because you're missing one of the great jokes of the century. Yourselves.

I don't deny that everything's bigger in America. Our former health secretary had a knee-trembler up against his office door in the pandemic; their current one apparently wrote felching ... poetry, is it ... felching poetry? ... to a superstar journalist who was worrying about his brainworm, yet the story is being written up like it's Dante, instead of X-rated Italian brainrot.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist