The Cake You Didn't Eat

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If there's one thing I know about nutrition, it's that cable news is the three-layer cake of a healthy diet. Although I've been caught with a slice more than a couple of times, hearing me talk, you'd think my fork never passed the first layer. In fact, I once told a woman I don't eat cake because it goes straight to my thighs. The truth is, I keep my diet in check, erring on the side of caution, so long as caution is savory and high in fat. Cake, however, remains a sample-size dose for me.

Before the frosting is dry, I'd like to discuss the Fox News scandal(s). This is not to criticize their top brass for being objectively hypocritical, but instead, I want to criticize everyone else. Before I get there, allow me to digress for just a moment.

We all want to live the good life. In its pursuit, many of us try something on for size that we later learn doesn't fit. As much as it would be nice to have our cake and eat it too, have too much of a good thing, and sooner or later, nothing fits.

Having spent my fair share of life piercing some things and tattooing others, I'm no foreigner to the life of wearing things that don't fit anymore. Occasionally one is covered up with facial hair, but unless your torso follicles produce a natural man sweater, others are there for everyone to see if the weather is nice.

Whether it's a tight T-shirt or a bad take, we all look back on something and blush a little. But one man's polyester suit is another man's luxurious gaberdine. Getting through life means getting over some things and getting away with others, so let's not let life get away from us. Sometimes you need to own up to the tattoos of the past or endure the painful removal process, which, whether you like it or not, will take a few freckles with it.

Imagine for a moment that the tattoo we'd like to remove is a tattoo on the mid-thigh of an entire nation.

Back in early 2020, we all were wondering why our friends were sharing some blog from Medium about how viruses spread. We were pissed that they canceled our drinks when it took a herculean effort to find a mutually fitting date, to begin with, while everyone around us seemed perfectly fine. Plus, our mouth was already watering for a particular gin drink on the menu of the cocktail lounge we'd been looking for an excuse to go to for some time now. This is obviously a metaphor for our entire nation, and to be clear, we understood when we saw what happened next.

Two weeks later, we were closing everything down. We would never have made it to drinks anyway. Look around us and half the people are wearing masks, and other people were explaining why they didn't work but condemning Anthony Fauci for agreeing with them. And then again for changing his mind.

Just another two weeks, and now we're calling people racist conspiracy theorists for suggesting that a virus escaped from a Chinese virology lab that studies the same family of viruses and happens to be near the outbreak's genesis. Next, we discovered something called disinformation; although we don't know what it is, but we'll know it when we see it.

Before you know it, we're all trying to find new websites to hang out on that will favor the narrative we want to hear while millions of people die.

Now three years later, the lab leak is the leading theory, and our old look hasn't aged well. For the most part, all of us were wrong about everything, and whether we lost a loved one or made it through unscathed, most of us are pointing out what our opponents got wrong while overlooking our own bad takes. But our skin has been marked, and this will require a tattoo cover-up because this tattoo is going to be too much to remove.

Don't feel bad. There's a confirmation bias shaped hole in all of us.

We always default to the flavor we favor and avoid the one we don't like. For me, it's carrot cake if I eat cake at all (even if pig meat gets first dibs at my digestive system). I'll dabble in tiramisu. Count me in on tres leches. Chocolate, on the other hand, is just not my thing. That's the cake I don't eat. It's fine for you, but I already know Carrot Cake (capitalization mine) is a better cake, so no need to try the latest double chocolate.

In my case, when I say, "I won't like your chocolate cake," it's my confectionery equivalent to calling someone racist for their provocative theories about pandemics. The moment I take a bite and then finish the whole piece is the moment I tell you it's not that I don't like chocolate cake. I just have high cake standards, and chocolate cake rarely meets them.

Admittedly, before you trust my "cakecaphony" of cake assertions, you should trust the cake experts themselves. I'm certainly not one of them. Cake doesn't have a click-through rate, and it doesn't have a style guide. When you use a recipe for baking a cake, it's not usually called plagiarism. Cakes are neither poetry nor prose, but only pastry or loaf.

And I'm not an enthusiast either. Cake can't be prepared medium rare, and it's usually not 53.5% alcohol by volume. So when I tell you chocolate cake is a no-go, it's because I don't like it. Not because I know what I'm talking about. And I realize that means I'm missing out on a complete data set. When I say that on a sample size of three kinds of cake, Carrot Cake is the best, it's 100% accurate, based on the data set I allowed into my scientific study.

Regarding the cause of the Covid 19 pandemic, the right selectively considered what they wanted and didn't try what they didn't like. The left selectively wrote it off and called it racist, despite the shared self-interest in getting to the bottom of it rather than trying to be on top of the narrative. There's no settled answer on what started the pandemic yet, and there may never be, but we all are looking back and seeing the error of our biases – or ignoring them.

Looking back on the past three years, I see a lot of cake we didn't eat. And a lot of tattoos people want to cover up. For one, Speaker Kevin McCarthy may as well have neck tattoos, but tattoos used to be interview killers. In Kevin's case, they got him the job. We'll see if he can keep it, but like any tattoo, eventually, people just get used to them.

This brings me to what this article is really about. Our appetite for information. When your appetite for news and commentary have you eating only your personal carrot cake and ignoring your version of chocolate cake, we're stuck in the dangerous isolation of selection bias.

Kevin McCarthy selectively shared the exclusive footage of the January 6th riots with one network. 41,000 hours in an effort to be "transparent" by sharing it ONLY with Fox News.

Fox News selectively shared what they wanted to share, combing through the thousands of hours to share the absolutely absurdly boring moments of the January 6th riots to create the narrative that the tone of the event was more like adult skate night than a riot intended to overturn an election followed by hundreds of Republican colleagues voting to turn over the same election before their cortisol levels had even gone back down.

Fox viewers selectively watched what they wanted to see and repeated its narratives. Some went to church and prayed for Trump to be put back in his rightful office (read "prayed to Trump"). Some anticipated the Supreme Court would hear a random case that would result in Biden and hundreds of other elected officials being removed from office. (spoiler, the case was tossed). This didn't age well, and it turns out the network knew better but liked the ratings more.

Don't judge a book by its cover, but whatever you do, please do judge a book. Fox News has proven time and time again that they are skilled at providing bad information or firing the people who provide good information. While Trump was doing everything from breaking the law to shitting in his Depends to stay in office, Fox propped up his stolen election narrative. The viewers believed it because that was the data set they allowed into their appetite.

Cable news, like cake, is bad for you, but it appeals to our cravings, so we consume it anyway. But there are some cakes you just shouldn't eat.

And if you've made it to the end of this article, you've only listened to the guy criticizing Fox News. You should try another flavor of cake from time to time.