A decade ago, TV's coverage of Operation Desert Storm rallied a newsgathering effort whose responsiveness was unknown during Vietnam, the oft-described "living room war" of a quarter-century earlier.

This was a new kind of war coverage that, thanks to satellite technology, delivered images of fighting as it happened.

"Instead of in the living rooms," recalls CNN veteran Bernard Shaw, "it was in people's faces."

And there were many faces to be seen.

Besides the soldiers from home, there were grinning Saudis and Kuwaitis who flashed the V-sign as they rolled past the cameras. There were Iraqi soldiers, wearing naked expressions of relief upon surrender or capture by allied forces once the ground war began.

But the high-tech marvels clashed with political agendas. Censors kept journalists away from much of the action, and didn't hesitate to pull the plug on correspondents' gadgetry if it fed an inconvenient message to the world.

With on-site video limited, and its broadcast often delayed, TV had to find other ways to explain what was happening. Every available military analyst was drafted for duty, and maps, charts and diagrams were used extensively.

ABC's Peter Jennings even took viewers for a walk through the Gulf region, striding across a huge map on the floor of his Manhattan studio.

"The way you control war coverage is to control the movement of reporters and camera crews," says Shaw, "and all sides did that very effectively – especially the Pentagon."

Despite its long tradition of a free press, the U.S. government came under fire from reporters, who complained that the media pool system for covering combat was designed less for efficiency than for managing the news.

Saudi censors, reacting to live TV pictures of nighttime Iraqi missile attacks, warned the networks not to report exact locations of missile strikes. Israeli officials, concerned that live TV shots of missile strikes could help Iraqis adjust their fire, issued similar cautions.

Early on, ABC scored with video showing a barrage of Iraqi anti-aircraft fire over Baghdad. Shot with a night-vision device that painted the city in a luminous green, the pictures showed tracer bullets that looked like streams of deadly pearls streaking into the pre-dawn sky. But those pictures couldn't be aired live. The footage was transported to Jordan for transmission hours later.

CNN got perhaps the most riveting scoop of the whole war with what, in effect, was a live radio dispatch. Blessed with an audio link in their ninth-floor Baghdad hotel room, Shaw and colleagues Peter Arnett and John Holliman gave voice accounts of explosions and anti-aircraft fire during the first U.S. air strikes.

"I'm lying on the floor," Shaw said during one eerie pause. "The sky over Baghdad is black. ... It occurs to me that I didn't get dinner tonight."

By next morning, Iraqi military authorities had ordered the reporters to cease those broadcasts.

Such coverage didn't go unnoticed at home, either. Assessing bomb damage during a news conference, Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, added the joking disclaimer, "at least according to what Bernie Shaw tells me."

TV was an information resource at the White House, too. President Bush watched the televised briefings given in Saudi Arabia by Schwarzkopf, his commander of U.S. forces in the region.

But Ken Bode notes that, through it all, there prevailed a mutual distrust between the press and the military.

"It was left over from the Vietnam War," says Bode, formerly a network correspondent and host of PBS' "Washington Week in Review" and now dean of Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.

"The press took into the Persian Gulf War the idea that the government will lie to the American people," he says. "The military assumed that the press is a disloyal and unreliable force, and therefore tried to keep us at arm's length."

Still, Bode voices hopes for eventual detente.

Shaw isn't such an optimist, despite subsequent conferences between the press and the Pentagon on finding ways to bury the hatchet in wartime.

"They all say, 'Well, let's do it different and better next time,'" declares Shaw. "But it'll never happen. We'll always be in contention."