ABSTRACT
This chapter elaborates the institutional links which constitute a major part of the preconstruction of the press discourse, which, in its representation of the Greenham protest, was certainly not produced in a vacuum, unaffected by allegiances, debts and political investments. It shows how social groups and institutions can, at particular historical moments, effect the definition and perpetuation of certain types of deviance. 1981. The D-notice represents the intensive, government-operated intervention that leads to a censored story, but it is also simply the institutionalised formulation of a strategy which functions in other, more accepted ways, such as editorial intervention. Similarly, the informal, banal suppression of a story can be brought about as effectively through the newspapers’ own routin-ised recourse to news values. It is for this reason that during the first year of the Greenham protest’s existence it received very little coverage in the press.
