Thread by @ikepigott

Hey there, world.

There is going to be a pretty big college football game tomorrow. CBS is carrying it in the middle of the afternoon. The teams playing are pretty good.

But there will be other attention during that telecast.

President Trump has made plans to be there. It's not often that a sitting president comes to a college football game that isn't Army and Navy. During most of the 150 years of college football, the sport wasn't important enough to warrant it.

What I ask is that as you watch the game, please don't make judgments about what you see and what you hear. Which is HARD, because our brains are wired to connect the senses. Our eyes and our ears reinforce each other in powerful ways.

But be careful...

For example:

Let's say the director cuts to a shot of President Trump watching the game from a skybox -- AND you hear a massive cheer erupt from the crowd.

You might think that those redneck MAGA Alabama fans are just crazy for Trump.

However...

...it may well be that as the director cut to that shot, the stadium had a different video playing on the jumbotron. Like, maybe, a video of Reuben Foster wiping out Leonard Fournette.

Or maybe there is a loud and lusty boo - but the crowd doesn't know that the CBS viewers are seeing Trump.

They are watching what appears to be a late hit on the quarterback, that the referees seemed to have missed.

The proximity of the sights and sounds is an illusion.

The people making noise are not necessarily reacting to the same thing that YOU are seeing.

The juxtaposition of those sensory experiences is powerful, and hard to override.

Now imagine how insanely easy it will be after the fact to "sweeten" the audio for viral video clips. Trump could claim evidence that the people there just LOVED him! (and maybe they will, we just don't know.)

Likewise, detractors might indeed edit in boos.

Fake boos, fake news. Fake cheers, your lying ears.

People are going to hear what they want, and there will be ample opportunity to cherry-pick the marriage of video and audio that supports the narrative.

This also goes for those who are attending the game. You might see a cameraphone video that purports to show the cheers or the jeers. But what you hear is a function of proximity.

I'd bet you would hear something different from the student section than the 50-yard-line.

This would be like getting crowd reaction right next to the LSU band, then assuming all 100,000 at the game were singing along to "Neck."

Be vigilant and skeptical. And more importantly, let the game be the game, and not a referendum on anything else. #RollTide #GeauxTigers

@threadreaderapp unroll please

And one more point:

If you’ve never been to Bryant-Denny, you don’t know how loud it can be. On TV, the degree of noise maxes at a certain level, regardless.

You can’t tell the difference between 10,000 people cheering, and 100,000. Same for boos.