Trump meets Ramaphosa: Did we all watch the same show?

Many sports lovers make a point of getting the papers – or logging onto their favourite news sites – the day after a game to reaffirm what they watched less than 12 hours before.

It’s a bizarre phenomenon, but it’s part of the burden that fans shoulder, including – for some – an obsessive desire to find out the minutiae of their sports stars’ lives from their pre-match rituals to their innermost thoughts on anything from Covid to the Cup final.

Sometimes though, you’ll pick up the paper the next day and wonder if the sports reporter watched the same game that you did.

There’s a huge gulf between what we think we see – and what we think others see. But it’s not just sport that gets this treatment.

Now that US President Donald Trump has rendered Oval Office meetings with visiting presidents into something like a spin-off series of The Apprentice, there would have been many South Africans who watched the Wednesday night televised meeting between Trump and President Cyril Ramaphosa to find out if their eyes had deceived them or not.

If you were a consumer of international media, you would have wondered the next day if their reporters had seen the same show.

If you had delved into the cesspits of social media, you would have been depressed, confused or strangely buoyed, depending on your algorithmic bias.

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South African media were more nuanced, as you would hope, with some a lot better than others.

It’s a feat of modern communications – and says more than we need to know about the comprehension levels of our neighbours, friends and family – that, to mangle Winston Churchill, so much could be spun by so few.

There was very little middle ground; the meeting was declared a victory by the CR haters and a massive triumph by Cupcake lovers.

To be fair, the bar had been set low after the televised February mauling of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Our championship golfers lined up the realpolitik putts they needed to, while EFF leader Julius Malema’s bête noir Johann Rupert chimed in with a contribution that was simultaneously fêted and condemned.

So, who won? As the great Springbok Boy Louw famously said: “Looks (sic) at the scoreboard.” If we stay in Agoa and Trump makes it to the G20, there will be no question at all, but given what the pre-match predictions were before last Wednesday, even a draw would have counted as a win.

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