BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Three weeks ago, three men working for the Arab satellite news channel Al Arabiya were at the scene of a rocket attack on a hotel, waiting for permission to film. The Coalition said no, and as they pulled out to leave, another car suddenly passed them, trying to break through the U.S. Army barricade. Ahmed Abdul Kassim was driving the Al Arabiya news van -- when he heard shots, he pressed hard on the gas pedal and sped himself and his colleagues to safety. At least he thought he had. When he was far enough away to slow down, he realized that both of his passengers were dead. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, as of Friday, 11 journalists have died in Iraq in 2004, all of them from the Middle East. Dan Murphy reports from Baghdad for the Christian Science Monitor, and he's covered the story. Dan, welcome to the show.

DAN MURPHY: Thanks for having me.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Al Arabiya is now considering legal action against the U.S. because of the death of those two newsmen.

DAN MURPHY: That's correct. It's not just the deaths of the newsmen; it's the fact that the American report on it exonerated the soldiers involved, and there were enormous discrepancies between the driver who survived the attack's account of what happened and the official American account of what happened. Certainly it's the case that if you go to Al Arabiya's offices now, there is a much greater anger towards the U.S. military and the U.S. government in general than there was before.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Arab journalists seem to be caught in the middle. You tell the story of a cameraman who was stringing for an Arab news outlet who was given a tip from insurgents who told him that they had just blown up a U.S. Humvee. He rushed to the scene -- can you describe what happened next?

DAN MURPHY: Absolutely. He went out, you know, like a lot of these stringers out in difficult areas, he has a camera, he works alone, and he's paid to get great footage of the latest attacks, and very often that makes the news, because that's what people are interested in seeing. So he rushes out to film it, the Americans on the scene are immediately suspicious, they think he's gotten there too soon, and he gets questioned about how he knew that something had happened, and they think maybe these people have foreknowledge of the attacks. Eventually he is allowed to leave, and he dispatches footage to Baghdad where it can be distributed to his station. The 5 o'clock news update hour comes and goes, and for whatever reason, they didn't use that footage, but he got paid a visit by the guy who gave him the call who were upset that their handiwork hadn't been on the air. They came into his place, and they had guns, and they threatened him.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: What is the impact of being pressured from both sides on these journalists?

DAN MURPHY:It's a sensitive subject, but I know that one large station has actually chosen not to use a lot of the good footage that it gets because of the allegations they've gotten from the Coalition that they tend to know too much, and that maybe they have foreknowledge of attacks. On the other side, in terms of the insurgents being upset with what you report or show footage of, I think it's very, very difficult for them to anticipate what's going to make those folks happy, so the Arab journalists say that they're trying to play it straight down the middle, and, and try to convince everybody that they're neutral parties, just the way any other journalist would. But it's not clear to what extent they're succeeding in doing that.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:We spoke about Al Arabiya and Al Jazeera as well-established news services that have been caught in between the two warring parties. Is this also true of the nascent Iraqi media?

DAN MURPHY: Certainly average Iraqi journalists will feel under threat. The interesting thing is, is there have been a number of attacks in recent months on translators and drivers and fixers for Western journalists. These are people that are Iraqis that help foreigners get the stories here. There have been 3 or 4 people like that killed in, let's say, the past month of six weeks, and they've clearly been targeted by insurgents. This category of people I'm talking about working with the Western journalists work in Baghdad a lot, just like we all do, but I'll come home to my safe compound, you know, hotel with protection around it at night, and these guys go back and they live in their Iraqi neighborhood, and people that want to do them harm know the street that they live on and, and that's how they get targeted.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Right. Dan, thank you very much.

DAN MURPHY: Thank you very much.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Dan Murphy reports from Baghdad for the Christian Science Monitor.