"Exception as e" would be better, but actually we don't need the exception object at all.  The logging.exception() method just takes a message argument; it gets the exception currently being handled from Python directly to log it.  So we might change this to:

    except Exception:
        logger.exception("Some message about this failure")

which would log both the message and the exception.

Another thing to consider would be narrowing the exceptions that get caught here to those we might expect if the JSON is bad, so we don't risk hiding other, worse problems.