Live coverage of the "toppling" of Saddam seen around the globe in April 2003.

After the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon by the terrorist group al Qaeda claimed nearly 3,000 American lives, few news organizations were in a mood to be skeptical about the war on terror proclaimed by George W. Bush.

CNN chairman Walter Isaacson actually ordered that reports about civilian casualties in the bombing campaign against al Qaeda's base of operations in Afghanistan be balanced with mentions of the Sept. 11 attacks. Despite that cooperative spirit, the invasion of Afghanistan proved to be maddeningly difficult for correspondents to cover — in part because key operations of the war were carried out by covert commandos, but also due to what some saw as the Bush administration's knee-jerk penchant for secrecy.

Reporters at a base in southern Afghanistan were confined to a warehouse, for example, while soldiers who had been injured by an errant U.S. bomb were brought in for treatment. A Washington Post correspondent was prevented at gunpoint from reaching the site of a missile strike by a CIA spy plane, and Special Forces troops brushed off pleas for help from news photographers as Afghan tribal fighters roughed them up and seized their gear.

Neil Hickey, an editor at the Columbia Journalism Review, complained that "journalists have been denied access to American troops in the field in Afghanistan to a greater degree than in any previous war involving U.S. military forces."

But a year and a half later the Pentagon adopted a radically different press policy for the invasion of Iraq. Close to 600 "embeds," journalists from major news organizations who had gone through training provided by the military, were allowed to accompany U.S. troops into battle. Equipped with high-tech communications gadgetry that kept them in virtually continuous contact with their newsrooms back home, the embeds filed a vast number of "life with the troops" stories and produced myriad grainy real-time digital video images of tanks lumbering through the desert.

Although there was little restriction on what they could report, their physical isolation and lack of ability to move independently made it more difficult for them to give much sense of the bigger picture of what was happening. Reports on skirmishes along the U.S. advance toward Baghdad, for example, gave the misleading impression that the Iraqi armed forces were putting up a stiff fight and impeding the invasion, when in reality they were about to crumble and allow U.S. armor to roll into the capital without resistance.

Coverage by cable networks, laden with patriotic graphics and stirring martial music, tended to focus on uplifting visual images — such as Iraqis mobbing statues of Saddam Hussein that had been torn down by U.S. troops — that didn't necessarily convey the essence of the violent, chaotic situation in which the occupiers soon found themselves.

Those nuances were better conveyed by print correspondents such as The New Yorker's Jon Lee Anderson, who published this harrowing description of being confronted by gunmen in the streets of Baghdad: "Sabah [his driver] jerked our car into reverse and pulled back into the street and then put the car into forward and accelerated — a cumbersome process that seemed to take forever. The two men with the guns had reappeared in their shooting stance. This time, with no other vehicles in sight, they were obviously aiming at us. But they paused. They didn't shoot, and in a few seconds we had got out of their line of fire ... "

Fortunately, that day Anderson did not become one of the 17 reporters who have lost their lives in Iraq so far &mdas; including a dozen killed in combat.