ANZCA08 Conference, Power and Place. Wellington, July 2008 What the British papers said on the second anniversary of the London bombing Nahid Kabir and Lelia Green Edith Cowan University Dr Nahid Kabir is a Research Fellow in the School of Communications and Arts at the Edith Cowan University in Perth, Western Australia. Dr Kabir is the author of Muslims in Australia: Immigration, race relations and cultural history (London: Kegan Paul, 2005). Email:
[email protected] Professor Lelia Green is co-chief investigator, with Professor Mark Balnaves, on an ARC Discovery Grant on Australian responses to the images and discourses of terrorism and the other: establishing a metric of fear. The author of Technoculture (2002, Allen & Unwin), Lelia is also Associate Dean, Research and Higher Degrees, Faculty of Education and Arts, Edith Cowan University. Email:
[email protected] Abstract1 In our previous refereed ANZCA conference paper, presented in July 2007, we discussed what the British newspapers (four British broadsheets and four tabloids) said on the first anniversary of the London bombings. We discussed the pattern of reporting, whether it was “nationalistic”, and whether it was “discriminatory”. In this paper we examine the same newspapers and evaluate how they reported on the second anniversary of London bombing and what that says about the continuing development of the British response to this terrorist attack. In this paper we take our argument beyond perceptions of “nationalistic” and “discriminatory” to raise the issue of whether such coverage can be construed as inspiring terrorists to commit more violence for media publicity. Introduction It is said that terrorists desire “three Rs: Revenge, Renown, Reaction” (L.