Now I won’t lie, I am not really a newspaper reader or SABC/ETV news watcher.  But even so, I do still want to know what’s going on in the world.  So I usually just end up skimming through the news headlines on my Twitter feed, making the assumption that the headline pretty much explains what went down and therefore I’m totally covered.

Then this past weekend I was paying for lunch at a restaurant and I had to go up to the till to use the card machine.  As I was waiting for them to process the transaction something caught my eye on the front page for the Cape Times:

Seems one of SA artist, Brett Murray’s pieces seriously pissed off the ANC…

I thought to myself… Hey, that painting of our president actually seems quite nice.  It had a cool modern feel, I liked the use of colour…  I really didn’t see anything wrong with it at all.  Why would they even waste ink on printing this story?  Meh.

Luckily the card machine was a bit slow, so I had a bit more time to kill.  I opened the newspaper and as I passed page 8 I had a very stong “Oh… now I see…” moment.

Right… right…

I have learnt a very valuable lesson here – ALWAYS get the full story.

xxx