In 1961, Daniel Schorr, then with CBS, and his cameraman got morning footage of East German troops laying barbed wire in Berlin on that night's 11 p.m. news. That was considered blazingly fast back then -- paradigm-shifting, even.

Consider how things have changed.

Some excerpts from the NYT story:

Those days seem as distant as candlelight and clipper ships in a capital where news (real or pseudo) is omnipresent, questions are perpetual (whether or not good answers are ready) and the effort to control the topic is often the most important political task of the day. Last Tuesday, when Democrats unwilling to let President Bush shift the spotlight from the indictment of a top White House aide to his new Supreme Court nominee threw the Senate into a special secret session on the intelligence that led to war in Iraq, cable channels carried the event live, with ticking countdown clocks.

By Thursday, the live shot was back to the arraignment of I. Lewis Libby Jr., who was forced to resign as Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff after his indictment on perjury and obstruction of justice charges in the C.I.A. leak investigation. But the quest for control of the narrative goes on - and on, and on, and on - for one big reason: leaders can't hope to control the situation if they can't first control the story.

"Over time and cultures, the most robust and most effective form of communication is the creation of a powerful narrative," said Howard Gardner, a professor of education at Harvard University and author of "Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People's Minds" (Harvard Business School Press, 2004). "Any one person or agent or institution that has the capacity to decide which story is operative, to sideline or minimize rival stories and to prepare for the next regnant stories, is in a very powerful position."

"That is what has happened in political campaigns, always with increasing ferocity, since 1960, and brought to tremendous heights or depths with the likes of Karl Rove, James Carville and Lee Atwater," Professor Gardner added, referring to a political consultants' hall of fame.

One big problem for Mr. Bush just now is that his master storyteller, Mr. Rove, is at the center of the prevailing one in an unsettling way. Mr. Rove remains under scrutiny by a special prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, over whether he told the truth about his conversations with journalists during the two-year investigation into who leaked the classified C.I.A. identity of Valerie Wilson, the wife of one of the Bush administration's sharpest critics of the rationale for war with Iraq, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV.

"There's an old saying that you can't open a new circus until the old circus leaves town," said David R. Gergen, who helped shape stories in Republican and Democratic administrations from Richard M. Nixon's to Bill Clinton's and now heads the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "It was just inevitable that this is going to continue to hang over their heads because the investigation continues. The Libby-Rove-Cheney story continues to have legs, and it's going to continue to for some time. And the war still goes on."

Indeed, part of the resonance of the leak investigation is that it goes back to the fierce debate over the validity of prewar intelligence about Saddam Hussein that led to a protracted and increasingly unpopular and costly conflict with no clear end in sight. The intrigue over who said what, and when, and why, and to whom about Ms. Wilson echoes the intrigue about the activities of one of the most secretive presidential administrations of modern times.

In other words, it's a good storyline. ...

"Kennedy is supposed to have seen our report from Berlin," recalled Mr. Schorr, who is now 89 and a senior news analyst for NPR News. "And he said: 'We're going to live in a different world when America can see on the same day what's happening in Europe. We've lost our ability to sit, and have time, and have an explanation to go with events.' I'm not sure he foresaw the day of CNN live all the time, but he did foresee that getting news on the air faster than we used to would drive them to make policy faster, or write statements, before they had thought them through. A lot of government's attention these days is focused on what do you say right away."

Mr. Schorr added: "I'm delighted about it myself, because I'm no longer primarily a television person. I love seeing that the people who exercised that absolute control have lost it, thanks to technology."