BROOKE GLADSTONE: Last weekend, guerrillas ambushed two American military convoys in the Iraqi town of Samarra, in one of the bloodiest gunfights since the U.S. invaded Iraq. That much is certain. What's less clear is how many lost their lives that day and who those people were. NPR's Ivan Watson was one of the reporters who arrived at the scene. He got this from Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt.

MARK KIMMITT: ...came under small arms and rocket-propelled grenade fire from multiple directions. The fire was determined to be coming from the windows and roofs of nearby buildings, as well as from alleyways and from nearby vehicles.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And this from Samarra resident

ABDUL HAMID SAMARAI:Maybe, maybe one or two or, or five or 10 man attack him, but the big peoples in the street, in, in the house, in the cities, not have, not have fire gun.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:The military is sticking by its assertion that 54 enemy insurgents and no civilians were killed, but local hospital officials can account for only eight deaths, among them civilians. For the past year and a half University of Michigan professor Juan Cole has been tracking developments in Iraq on his weblog, JuanCole.com. He gets his information from Middle Eastern as well as Western media. He also has contacts in military intelligence. Cole was less surprised by the disparity in the body counts than he was by the fact that the Pentagon released such a precise number in the first place -- something it hasn't done since the Vietnam War.

JUAN COLE: It's quite odd, actually, that they did that, because they have resisted counting enemy dead all through recent wars. There's no official U.S. count for enemy dead in the Gulf War, in the Afghanistan War or in the Iraq War as it was fought in, in March and April.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:It's the reliance on enemy death tolls that seems to echo back to Vietnam. At the time it was used to foster the impression that the war was progressing better than it actually was. Do you think that the same political calculus is beginning to emerge now in Iraq?

JUAN COLE: I don't think it, it actually was, initially at least, a political maneuver in the sense that these reports of guerrillas killed seems to have come from pretty low down -- from the actual soldiers who did the fighting, rather than having been issued initially from General Sanchez. It could have turned into that, possibly. Once they began sticking to their guns, then that seems to have more of a public relations tinge to it.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Well, it's easy to jump to the conclusion that the best antidote for official military reports about events on the ground in Iraq would be eyewitness accounts from people who are actually there, but you have to wonder if it's really a better way to get at the truth. Recent media coverage of the deaths of two American soldiers in Iraq depended heavily on eyewitness accounts that the soldiers' throats had been cut, and that turned out not to be true.

JUAN COLE: No, but it does appear to be the case that the soldiers had been shot in the neck, so you could easily imagine why the eyewitnesses drew that conclusion. And anybody who deals with eyewitnesses, whether it's police or historians, knows that eyewitnesses are often unreliable. In the case of, of something like Samarra, I think it's just going to remain very murky.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:What do you think that news organizations could do or should do to give us a more accurate picture of what's happening on the ground?

JUAN COLE: Well I think they should be trying to draw from a wider range of sources. I remember recently seeing a Western television reporter being interviewed who was based in, in Baghdad, and he was asked, you know, "What's the situation like now in Baghdad? What's the security situation like?" And he said "Well for Iraqis it, it's good; it's fine. But we Westerners are increasingly being seen as soft targets, so we are in great danger." And that simply was not true. Iraqis are being carjacked and kidnapped and, and assassinated all the time in Baghdad. There's a very high murder rate. And this person doesn't seem to have known this, and I'm quite sure he didn't speak Arabic, and he wasn't in contact with local people who could have told him what the real situation was. He was, in a way, you know, imbedded in, in Western journalism.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So it's possible to be in Baghdad and still live in a bubble.

JUAN COLE:Oh, yes. I think that a large number of Americans in Baghdad are in a bubble. I think the Coalition Provisional Authority on the whole and by and large is itself in a bubble. So I, I think that it's, it's really important to have Arabists on the team, not just people picked up from the street to do shoddy translation, but bilingual journalists.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Do you think that most Americans would be surprised if they read the same sorts of sources you've been reading on the war in Iraq?

JUAN COLE: Yes. I, I think that it's not generally understood by most Americans the degree to which the mood of the country is depressed. No Iraqis like the idea of being occupied, because after all, what modern Iraq is, is a struggle against British occupation, and all of them have had that drilled into them by the education system. But as a matter of practical reality, they know very well if the Americans just disappeared tomorrow, that the country would fall into chaos. So they don't want to be occupied, but they do want to be occupied. It, it is a very ambiguous situation.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Well, I guess that's my last question then. Do you know what's going on? Is it truly an impossible thing to get from so many miles away, and can you even get it if you're standing in the middle of it?

JUAN COLE: No, I, I don't think it's possible, really, to know what's going on at the moment. I think, because of the lack of security, you, you don't have the ability, really, to, to roam freely, even for the reporters that are on the ground, and people see different things. So I think that the situation is inherently subjective, and that's why it is so controversial. I don't pretend to have a, a complete handle on it. All that I can do is to attempt to report information that seems significant and to try to give it some context, and then I'll let others decide how valuable it is.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well you're a historian. You're used to being patient.

JUAN COLE:Yes, [LAUGHS] that's right. There's a, a joke that an Oxford don was approached by a graduate student about a PhD dissertation on the Spanish Armada in the 1500s, and the don said "No, passion still raged too greatly [LAUGHTER] about that. It's better to choose a more distant subject."

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Thank you very much.

JUAN COLE: You're very welcome.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Juan Cole is a professor of Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. He posts his daily ruminations on the War in Iraq on his webblog, JuanCole.com.

BOB GARFIELD: Coming up, image politics on Turkey Day, and media weight watchers.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media, from NPR.