Looking back at the coverage of the twenty-five years of conflict it would appear that – apart from the overall consideration of control of the news flow – there were three major concerns in the minds of the censors. Firstly, a reluctance to allow the screening of material which might tend to arouse support for the Nationalist position, in other words the policies of both the Dublin Government and the SDLP. Secondly, an extreme sensitivity to information which placed the security forces in a bad light (one of the cuts which prompted Thomas’s resignation was a shot of a tombstone which read:
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