"Suicide Bomber" vs suicide bomber

December 29, 2020·Politics

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That’s a still from the police camera on 2nd Avenue in Nashville, Tennessee on Christmas morning, capturing the detonation of a large bomb. The bomber was killed, eight people were injured, and massive damage was done to an entire downtown city block, including the destruction of an AT&T telecom hub. Here are some photos of the damage, from a local news twitter feed:

While far less heinous than the 1995 Oklahoma City attack, where 168 Americans (including 15 children) were killed, the Nashville attack was the largest domestic terrorist bomb detonation in 25 years.

It is striking to me how silent the White House has been about this terrorist attack.

It is striking to me how national media has used the language of crime and police procedure in their coverage of the Nashville bombing, rather than the language of terrorism and political response.

The Nashville attack was carried out by a suicide bomber terrorist.

But because the bomber's terrorist goals, whatever they were, do not fit neatly into a useful political narrative like "Antifa!" or "Law and Order!", Trump says NOTHING about the attack, not even to recognize that it occurred or to thank first responders.

At least Biden did that. Even with Biden, though, the bomber's terrorist goals do not fit neatly into a useful political narrative like "Proud Boys!", so we get bromides like "the need for vigilance". And that's that.

So, yes, the Nashville attack was carried out by a suicide bomber terrorist. But not by a "Suicide Bomber". Not by a "Terrorist".

And without a politically charged cartoon to grab eyeballs and attention, national media organizations and national political organizations have next to zero interest in this story. Not completely zero. Maybe some MAGA or Q connection will turn up here, and then they'll get interested again. But as things stand now, there will be essentially zero national news coverage of this event by this time next week.

Here, I'll show you what all this looks like in the Narrative Machine.

This is a visualization of all unique major US media news stories over the four day period Dec. 25 through Dec. 28, utilizing the Natural Language Processing (NLP) and clustering/visualization software of our friends at Quid (now Netbase Quid, to be precise).

If you were to zoom into this graphic, you'd see that it's composed pointillism-style of thousands of individual dots, each of which represent one of those unique major US media news stories. The individual dots are connected and colored and clustered by their linguistic similarity. I like to think of it like a star map, where the "gravity" of similar words and grammatical structures arranges these individual articles into clusters of similar meaning. Up and down and left and right have no importance in reading this "map". What's important is the centrality of the clusters (the more central you are to the overall map, the more connected you are and the more narrative gravity you're exerting on everything else) and the structure of the clusters relative to each other.

[For more on how to read and apply these narrative maps, see The Epsilon Strategy]

So what we're looking for in terms of narrative importance, roughly speaking, is a combination of size and centrality and connectedness. Just because you're a big cluster doesn't necessarily mean you're an important cluster for the narrative ... for example, Market News, that light blue cluster off by itself on the right, is the largest single cluster in the map, but it's almost completely disconnected from the overarching narrative structure. Ditto for clusters on sports or movies or celebrity news.

Now I'll zoom into the "center of gravity" for the map so we can see these narrative-crucial clusters:

Both the long yellow cluster and the long aqua cluster running vertically through this zoomed-in view of the US media structure over this four day period are general Covid-related clusters. You've got a third Covid-related cluster at the top of this zoomed-in view that's solely focused on California cases and policies ... as you'd expect, Covid exerts more "gravitational pull" on this narrative structure than anything else.

Trump's claims of election fraud are that purple cluster, connected closely to the Georgia Senate runoff election cluster in green. Also as you'd expect. In a technical structural analysis, the Trump Election Fraud cluster is THE center of gravity of this entire map.

The small, central clusters - like the death of star Utah running back Ty Jordan - are always interesting to me. There weren't many stories written about Jordan, but there was something about these stories that "clicked" with the narrative Zeitgeist. Weird, right? But I remember seeing this story when it first came out the day after Christmas, and I immediately clicked on it and read it. I bet a lot of you had the same experience.

The two clusters I want to focus on, however, are the Nashville Bomb cluster in orange and what I'm calling the Narrative-aware Crime cluster in pink.

The Nashville Bomb cluster is very straightforward. There's a sub-cluster on the right composed of articles about the actual event ... the explosion, the emergency response, etc. ... and a sub-cluster on the left composed of articles about the subsequent investigation. It's all very just-the-facts material, and without a more politically-charged hook for the material, you can see in the timeline of story clusters-within-the-cluster how the coverage transforms and diminishes over time. Today it's pretty much an area-man-commits-a-terrible-crime-and-neighbors-are-puzzled story. Yes, he was a suicide bomber and a terrorist. No, he was not a "Suicide Bomber". No, he was not a "Terrorist".

Now here's the Narrative-aware Crime cluster, by which I mean stories about crimes that are typically not as "big" as the Nashville bomb attack, but which plug neatly into a powerful social or political narrative.

THIS is where you find the Hunter Biden stories. THIS is where you find the Trump Pardon stories. THIS is where you find the Law and Order stories. THIS is where you find the Bad Parent / Urban Violence / Terrorist stories.