Hold back engineers and reporters (7)
I believe the answer is:
repress
'hold back' is the definition.
(thesaurus)
'engineers and reporters' is the wordplay.
'engineers' becomes 're' (Royal Engineers).
'and' says to put letters next to each other.
'reporters' becomes 'press' (I've seen this before).
're'+'press'='REPRESS'
(Other definitions for repress that I've seen before include "bottle up" , "Keep in subjection" , "Restrict freedom of" , "Forcibly keep down" , "Curb" .)