Both sides in the media war are gasping for the oxygen of publicity, says David Miller

It was only with the emergence of the Hume-Adams process that the basics of political reporting required a glimpse of Republican perspectives. Gerry Adams suddenly started to appear regularly on British TVs, so enraging some Tory MPs that Dame Jill Knight asked John Major to tighten the restrictions. The bone of contention was that the lip synchronisation between the Sinn Fein leader's mouth and the actor speaking his words was so close as to give the impression that Adams himself was speaking. However, it is clear that such interviews are explicitly allowed by the ban. In any case, a reasonable period was allowed to elapse before the Department of National Heritage review quietly announced that the ban should stay as it was.

The ban is only the most obvious and most recent way in which media coverage of the conflict in Northern Ireland is constrained. The Government has increasingly felt it necessary to use the law - and intimidation - to censor the media. In the last ten years, government attacks on current affairs coverage have reached a crescendo. Attempts to have programmes stopped have a high chance of success, as the withdrawing of a Real Lives documentary in 1985 after pressure from Home Secretary Leon Brittan shows.

The Government was less successful with Thames TV's Death on the Rock in 1988, which raised the possibility that the SAS killings in Gibraltar were extra-judicial executions. But the subsequent loss of Thames' franchise was widely seen as retribution for it.

The way forward? Before the results of the Broadcasting Ban review were announced the Government had given hints (in off-the-record briefings) that the ban could be lifted if Sinn Fein accepted the Downing Street declaration. The Government's current mood is unclear.

The use of censorship in public relations manoeuvring has also been widespread in the South of Ireland, although Section 31, the equivalent of the British ban, was lifted in January. This move was widely interpreted, following briefings from Dublin, as an Irish government carrot to Sinn Fein to accept the declaration. It was less widely noted that the Irish government was more or less obliged to lift Section 31 following a report by the United Nations Human Rights Committee which condemned it as a breach of free speech.

The success of public relations is also evident in coverage of the Hume-Adams process and the subsequent Downing Street declaration. Ministers have repeatedly said they will not negotiate on the declaration. Yet, in off-the-record briefings, hints have been dropped about what can be expected if Sinn Fein accept the declaration. As we have heard, night after night, that the peace initiative is dead or still on track, it has become evident that the Government is engaged in clarification and negotiation - via a kind of megaphone diplomacy in the media.

Rarely do journalists acknowledge that the briefings they are given are actually part of the negotiation process, and this is one of the key blind spots of mainstream British journalism's coverage of Northern Ireland. It is routine for journalists to evaluate events in Northern Ireland in terms of the "propaganda victory" they might offer the Republicans, but similar phrases are never used to describe British tactics. A credit to governmental media management, this is a key way in which the tentacles of censorship shape how we perceive the conflict.

The IRA mortar attacks on Heathrow provide an illustrative example. After the first attack, the runway on which the bombs had landed was not closed for 45 minutes. Good PR evidently played a part in this decision, with Commander David Tucker of the anti-terrorist squad stressing that "the airport is open". In fact, it was clear flights had been severely disrupted and one terminal closed.

Following further IRA warnings the next day, the authorities left the airport open for seven hours - even allowing the Queen to land - before the mortars were launched. Commander Tucker said, "We can't allow the airport to be closed down by a terrorist whose weapon is a telephone." The safety of passengers and even the economic well-being of Heathrow provide one rationale for keeping the airport open, but it is clear that PR priorities were a factor in the decision. The IRA are (rightly) condemned by the media when they put civilians at risk. Yet there was no comparable condemnation of the authorities for risking civilian safety for propaganda advantage. Instead, television journalists summarised and justified the official reaction. ITN declared: "The authorities are understandably unwilling to allow the terrorists to disrupt normal life," But surely the risk to civilians deserves a mention.

This is one of the central dilemmas for the Government. They want to play down the impact of the conflict while asserting a determined resolve. The strategy of successive governments has been to present the conflict as slowly declining, as getting "back to normal". To this end, they have spent millions of pounds presenting Northern Ireland as a tourist paradise and attractive business proposition. The Northern Ireland Office has condemned the media focus on the conflict as counter-productive. Spirited resolve is the real story of Northern Ireland, they say. More and more, there is an acceptance that this, rather than the media image of the masked terrorist, is the true face of Northern Ireland.

Yet at the same time the Office is engaged in producing its own images of masked terrorists. TV commercials for confidential telephone tip-off lines use ultra-dramatic footage of terrorists. Ironically, they sometimes get censored. One commercial used a photo for a fraction of a second. The IBA blocked the ad until the shot was increased from four frames to eight to remove its subliminal power.