Tracers and explosions light up the early morning sky over Baghdad during an American airstrike on January 18, 1991.

The U.S. military, still smarting from the embarrassing exposés by war correspondents in Vietnam, aggressively tried to thwart coverage in the 1980s and early 1990s. When U.S. forces invaded the Caribbean island nation of Grenada in 1983, for example, the press was not allowed to accompany the invasion force — though some managed to get onto the island anyway, by hiring their own boats. In 1989, a small group of reporters was allowed to accompany troops to Panama City on the mission to apprehend Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, but they were not allowed to venture out of briefing rooms until the fighting had died down.

In the 1991 Gulf War, the Pentagon's limits on the 1,600 correspondents covering the hostilities nearly reached World War I levels. Only military-organized pools of reporters and cameramen were allowed to join combat units, and the visits had to be authorized in advance.

Infractions were sometimes harshly punished — a Time magazine photographer, for example, was detained by U.S. troops and kept blindfolded for 30 hours. A TV crew was forced at gunpoint to hand over footage showing a wounded American solder.

Nevertheless, some journalists found ways to circumvent the restrictions. Boston Globe and New Republic freelancer Michael Kelly, for example, arranged to accompany America's Egyptian allies into the field. While the Pentagon-authorized media pool waited for permission to cover a battle at the border town of Khafji, foreign TV journalists slipped into the fray and got terrifying footage of the actual fighting.

Others, such as CNN's Peter Arnett and Bernard Shaw, actually managed to cover the war from the enemy capital, Baghdad, producing startling live coverage of the U.S. air bombardment.