Beyond the headline

“Look at those hands,” beseeched our new president of the 17 million viewers who tuned in to watch the March 3 Republican presidential debate hosted by Fox News. “Are they small hands?“ he asked rhetorically in an attempt to disprove seemingly irrelevant criticisms of his physical appearance. “And he referred to my hands,” continued the soon-to-be leader of the free world, “if they’re small, something else must be small. I guarantee you there is no problem,” said Donald J. Trump in clear reference to the wealth of information at his fingertips. Of course, it follows that big hands would boast big fingers, which naturally would have big fingertips with access to an abundance of information, especially in this day and age when “d**k jokes” can be retrieved by the thousands with the simple click of a mouse.

The next morning, Facebook feeds the world over were littered with headlines about the previous night’s debate, which mentioned Trump’s offhand-hand comments. So much information about the 11-man policy debate on Russia’s looming geopolitical threat, trade policy, fiscal policy, the Migration Crisis and the general future of our nation was readily available, and yet I—and the majority of my generation—would allow my information intake to be limited to the few emboldened words my eyes can capture before a single scroll of the mouse pad drives the articles out of frame.

Suddenly, my hands feel a lot smaller.

The Internet and social media have greatly increased our ability to access information; however, in doing so, they have decreased our ability to absorb it. Paradoxically, the more information that we have, the less we have. Absolutely no one has time to read the countless number of perspectives that we have readily available to us the microsecond after a headline-worthy event takes place, but we like to act as if we take advantage of it all, and so we settle for breadth in a system in which both breadth and depth is unachievable. Rather than reading one or a few articles in depth, we opt to read the headlines because it is more time-efficient and it allows us to give off the illusion of being well read in a time when both sides of debate condemn the other for having unvaried media diets. But whether your echo chamber consists of Breitbart and Fox News or The Huffington Post and MSNBC, you will not properly inform yourself by reading the few—and often misleading—words that comprise the teasers to 800- to 1000-word compositions of original analysis.

For the past year and a half, the man with the big (?) hands—who so eloquently alluded to the Information Age paradox that plagues my generation—has dominated the news. Since the election, Trump’s presence in the headlines has only increased, and if the past few weeks have been any indication, his name will continue to appear in bold face over the next four years. With a president who always finds his name in the headlines, it will be important for the American people to read about the reasons why the font size of the name “Trump” dwarfs the words located beneath it.

Recently, the name “Trump” has been plastered to the tops of news headlines, as if they were luxury hotels, for a variety of reasons, but the two most frequently discussed have been the incident where Trump allegedly mocked a disabled reporter at a rally of his in South Carolina and the president’s success in convincing companies, like Carrier, Ford and Fiat-Chrysler, to invest in American jobs. If one were to simply read the headlines—as many Americans do—he/she would consider the first newsworthy event an unquestionable travesty and the second newsworthy event an unqualified success; however, in both cases, there is more to the story than a few words at the top of the page.

With regards to Trump’s alleged mocking of a disabled reporter at a rally in South Carolina, an event which occurred more than a year ago but has recently been revitalized as a topic of discussion because of comments made by Meryl Streep in a speech at the Golden Globes, it is important to note that Trump has used similar demonstrations before to imitate “flustered” people regardless of any physical limitations. Trump made such a motion when imitating banking executives, army generals and Ted Cruz. Furthermore, Trump’s motions are only vaguely characteristic of Serge Kovaleski’s disability, which restricts arm movement entirely, and it is likely that Trump did not even recall that Kovaleski had a disability, as the reporter’s most recent contact with Trump was when he covered him for the New York Times in the early 1990s.

With regards to Trump’s success in persuading businesses to create jobs in America, as opposed to shipping jobs overseas, it is important to express concern with regards to the means that achieve the ends. Trump’s first landmark success in this area was his announcement that Carrier—a premier air conditioner manufacturing company—would forgo building a factory in Mexico, and keep 1,000 jobs in Indiana that would have otherwise moved south of the border. However, it is possible that more than just an optimistic view of the business climate under a President Trump kept the organization in Indiana. Politico reports that John Mutz, a former Indiana lieutenant governor who sits on the member board of United Technologies, Carrier’s parent company, was threatened to not build the Mexico plant with the rejection of billions of dollars in federal defense contracts. If Trump did indeed use even one of United Technologies’ 178 military contracts and by extension taxpayer dollars to coerce Carrier not to build its Mexico factory, then his other “successes” are dubious.

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