From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's Alma Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield. Unprecedented. The word has been used a lot over the past two weeks.

Unprecedented attacks, unprecedented terror, unprecedented tragedy.

Another precedent said over a decade ago suggests how the press will

cover what CNN has dubbed America's New War. Think back to the first time Dick Cheney

and Colin Powell ran a war effort and a president named George Bush called the shots.

In this week's New Yorker, Joe Klein said that the Gulf War is widely considered to be an

abject failure, but that hardly seems to jive with public perception.

The American public saw laser-guided missiles, they saw the liberation of Kuwait,

and they saw press conferences where a clueless press corps jeopardized American security,

so hilariously depicted in a sketch 12 years ago on Saturday Night Live.

Colonel, Colonel, knowing what you know,

where would you say our forces are most vulnerable to attack,

and how could the Iraqis best exploit those weaknesses?

Well, again, this falls into that area of information that might be useful to the enemy,

and I just can't divulge it.

It was a case of the military being more media savvy than the media.

Colin Powell says that once he saw the sketch, he knew that he had won over the public.

On the other hand, you have the Academy Award-nominated movie, Wag the Dog,

which depended on the audience being in on the joke that propaganda and misinformation proliferated during the Gulf War.

But that was a peacetime movie.

Last week on the CNN program Talk Back Live, host Bobby

...