Bannon the Bomb Thrower

I read the New York Times almost every day but, being British, I often find the wording a little odd. This morning, when I read the description of Stephen Bannon as "the edgy, nationalist bomb-thrower", I almost dropped my phone.

In British English, as far as I know, the expression 'bomb thrower' is generally applied to people on the terrorist/freedom fighter spectrum, if it is used at all.

But I have since learned that it is a figure of speech in American English that means troublemaker, and that the Times wasn't accusing the White House chief strategist and Breitbart founder of literally setting off explosive devices to further the nationalist cause.

Nevertheless, I still find it somehow shocking to see it deployed so casually in the pages of the Times, a serious newspaper of record.

I'm used to the British press, where criticism of public figures in the tabloids can be harsh to the point of ridiculous. I recall picking up a copy of the Sun in a greasy spoon cafe a few years ago and seeing a photo of the then-Labour Party leader Ed Miliband's head pasted onto the body of a cheese-eating monkey waving a white flag, a visually literal yet novel take on an absurd slur normally reserved for the French.

So it's striking that the description of Bannon as a bomb thrower still raised a red flag for someone as desensitised as me.

I was curious about the potential libel implications, so I asked one of my company's media lawyers, Jaime Wolf, who is with the firm Pelosi Wolf Effron & Spates, whether he would be concerned about the use of this expression in an article to be published by one of his clients.

"In truth I probably would have skipped right over it because the figurative use of 'bomb thrower' seems to have become so commonplace these days," he wrote.

In fact a Google Books Ngram search shows that usage of the term 'bomb thrower' peaked around 1919 and has remained steady since the 1980s, although that doesn't distinguish between figurative and literal use. There are many recent examples of the U.S. news media using it as shorthand for an outspoken conservative public figure such as Bannon or former Breitbart columnist Milo Yiannopoulos.

But context is critical in cases such as this, Wolf adds.

This makes sense. In many other situations, I would easily have been able to work out that 'bomb thrower' was being used figuratively from the context, but unfortunately, the idea of Steve Bannon blowing things up is, in my mind at least, all too plausible.

The proximity of the word 'nationalist' in the sentence doesn't help, either. When I see the words 'nationalist' and 'bomb' next to each other, a very literal image comes to mind.

To me, that would appear to make the libel case stronger, but even so, the attorney says that the more an description is used without being challenged, the more confident you can be in using it.

"For better or worse, once a person is tagged with a certain epithet, it probably becomes progressively safer to use it each time," he writes. "If Bannon has been called a 'bomb thrower' by dozens of publications, it would seem pretty captious for him to suddenly take offense. And from a legal perspective, by failing to take action earlier, he may have waived his right to claim reputational damage so late in the game."

So, bombs away!