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Of all the words you could use to describe the reporting from Iraq, you could go through a bunch before you’d get to “too rosy.”

But a new Project for Excellence in Journalism survey of American reporters covering Iraq says that correspondents over there overwhelmingly believe the picture being painted for us here is accurate – with some even thinking it, yes, “too rosy.”

According to the Reuters story:

Nearly 90 percent of U.S. journalists in Iraq say much of Baghdad is still too dangerous to visit, despite a recent drop in violence attributed to the build-up of U.S. forces, a poll released on Wednesday said.

The survey by the Washington-based Pew Research Center showed that many U.S. journalists believe coverage has painted too rosy a picture of the conflict…

"Eight in 10 journalists believe conditions have deteriorated for reporters since their own first posting in the country," the survey's authors said.

Before going any further, it’s critical to note that the actual percentage of the respondents who consider the coverage unrealistically positive was 15 percent, with 70 percent saying that the coverage, while admittedly negative, is accurate.

But much of the study’s other findings are jarring and disturbing.

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David Bloom. Michael Kelly. Kimberly Dozier. Bob Woodruff.

Anwar Abbas Lafta.

The first four are well-documented and oft-discussed American media casualties of our military engagement in Iraq, regularly cited as examples of the dangers of reporting from the front.

But the last was an Iraqi who served as a translator for CBS News in Baghdad before he was kidnapped and killed. His name and commitment and spirit were discussed for just a few days after his death. But it is Lafta’s fate that is far more common, while also being far less known.

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On Tuesday night, CBS will air a one hour special called "Flashpoint," about the aftermath of a roadside bomb that exploded in Iraq last May. CBS News' James Brolan and Paul Douglas were killed in the attack, as well as Army Capt. James Alex Funkhouser and his Iraqi translator. Correspondent Kimberly Dozier was severely injured but managed to survive, and after dozens of operations and months of recovery she is now back to work. We spoke with her today.

Brian Montopoli: How are you feeling?

Kimberly Dozier: Feeling great when you think about where I was almost a year ago. I am back to walking, back to running, back to doing just about everything that I used to do. Except for a couple of really complicated yoga poses that require half knee bend. You know, I can't do half lotus right now. But that's about it.

Brian Montopoli: Do you have a different perspective on journalism as a result of what you went through? Are you approaching stories differently?

Kimberly Dozier: Well, I've done about five stories in the past couple weeks. One for "Sunday Morning" on female combat amputees, and a series for the "Evening News." Because of the subject matter, because I chose things that I'd seen and lived through and reported on just by living through them, I haven't had a real test in the field yet on a different subject.

For these particular stories, I empathize so much with everyone involved. That's part of the reason I want to tell the stories...one was extremity war injuries. The reason I'm doing the story is because that's what I've got. Blast injuries to my arms and legs. And I had no idea that about 82 percent of American troops, most of the injured troops coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan, have these sorts of injuries. And these injuries are presenting bizarre medical mysteries that doctors really don't know how best to treat.

Now in my case, it meant a number of debates. When everyone thought I was doing well and on the road to recovery at Bethesda Naval, actually every week there was some new nightmare, some new horror that would appear that required me, us as a family, to decide which option we wanted to take. Because they don't know. I had Acinetobacter, an Iraqi bacteria, it's also prevalent throughout the Middle East and Europe. Normally innocuous. But you blast it into a body that's compromised, that's immune compromised because of the trauma it's going through, and all of a sudden it flourishes, and it flourishes to the point that it can kill you.

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In Glamour – and I think it's safe to say this is the first time we've linked over there – CBS News Correspondent Kimberly Dozier has told the story of the Baghdad attack that left her critically injured and killed colleagues Paul Douglas and James Brolan.

"Over the years, my colleagues and I had constantly debated the risks of our jobs, but felt that they were worth taking to bring the public’s attention to whatever the crisis was, wherever it was… this was the day all of our instincts let us down," she writes.

Continues Dozier: "We were filming a routine patrol led by [U.S. Army Captain James] Funkhouser, an upbeat Texan well liked by his troops. [Funkhouser was killed in the attack.] At the patrol’s first stop, we got out of our Humvees to trail him down a mostly empty street. Suddenly I was slammed into blackness as the air filled with a smell like fireworks. Later I learned that a bomb-packed car, just waiting for a U.S. patrol, had been detonated as we passed. I wound up lying on the pavement, shocked into numbness. I dimly remember the popping sound of bullets—exploding ammo from a Humvee ignited by the bomb. But with both eardrums blown out, I didn’t hear much else."

Read the whole thing over at Glamour. On May 29, CBS is airing a documentary called "Flashpoint: Kimberly Dozier and the Army's Fourth ID -- A Story of Bravery, Recovery and Lives Forever Changed." More on that here.

'Emerging From A Nightmare': CBS News Correspondent Kimberly Dozier has written a reflection six months after the attack in Iraq that injured her and killed her colleagues Paul Douglas and James Brolan. Also killed were 4th Infantry Division Capt. James Funkhouser and his Iraqi translator.

"The U.S. military treated me as one of its own, saving my life a few times over, with the best people, the best training and the best equipment. I was blessed time and again on my particular journey, with daily encounters with extraordinary people who helped put my body, and in some instances, my spirit, back together again," Dozier writes. "But the U.S.-led coalition cannot scoop up every bomb victim, and whisk them across the globe like they did me. I watch the near-daily video of Iraqi bombing victims, and study them as their crying family members drag them from the scene, or cradle them on a hospital floor, begging for a doctor. I see where the shrapnel ripped into their bodies, and think to myself: 'Dear God. Those wounds are like mine. In an Iraqi hospital…they won't survive the night.'"

'You' Edge Out A Holocaust Denier: Had the Time Magazine "Person of the Year" not been "You," it would have been Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, according to Stephen Koepp, Time's deputy managing editor. Other rejected candidates: That dude you know, that woman over there with the thing, Donald Trump.

Shooting Shooting: The Los Angeles Times, in a discussion of "YouTube Journalism," brings attention to one of the most jarring videos the site has ever offered. It is, allegedly, a scene from the border of Tibet and Nepal. A video shows a group of what appear to be Tibetan pilgrims on their way to visit the Dalai Lama. And they are being shot – "like dogs," according to a voiceover – by Chinese soldiers. The video is here.

Writes Moisés Naím: "Fifteen years ago, the world marveled at the 'CNN effect' and believed that the unblinking eyes of TV cameras, beyond the reach of censors, would bring greater global accountability. These expectations were, to some degree, fulfilled. Since the early 1990s, electoral frauds have been exposed, democratic uprisings energized, famines contained and wars started or stopped thanks to the CNN effect. But the YouTube effect will be even more powerful..."

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It's now been eight days since the roadside bomb attack in Baghdad that killed CBS News cameraman Paul Douglas and soundman James Brolan and critically injured correspondent Kimberly Dozier. The attack also took the lives of Army Capt. James Funkhouser and an Iraqi interpreter.

Covering news involving your own people is a unique challenge for a news organization, particularly when the news is tragic.

"This is what journalism is all about," says "Evening News" anchor Bob Schieffer. "We are trained to deal with tough stories. It's always harder when it involves someone you know, but you always have to fall back on your training."

"I think the basic issue is finding the right balance between covering the incident which in essence happened to involve our people…and balancing that with the fact that there are a lot of other people who this has happened to," says CBS News Vice President Paul Friedman.

CBS' coverage, says "Evening News" Executive Producer Rome Hartman, had to reflect the fact that "this is the kind of terrible news that thousands of families have received, and this time it was our family. It's no more serious or awful or tragic than what other families have experienced, but also no less so." He adds that when people at CBS first heard the news, "our first instinct was compassionate, not journalistic."

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Estimating the numbers of people killed in any war is an inexact science. But the deaths of CBS News cameraman Paul Douglas and soundman James Brolan, who were killed by a car bomb while accompanying a military patrol in Baghdad, along with a U.S. soldier and an Iraqi interpreter, may represent a milestone.

According to Ann Cooper of the Committee To Protect Journalists, 71 journalists and 26 support staffers have been killed in the Iraq war. "That number [71] is more than the 63 killed in Vietnam, the 17 killed in Korea, and even the 69 killed in World War II, according to Freedom Forum, a nonpartisan free speech advocacy group," notes the New York Times. The Times thus determines that, at least by some estimates, "the death of two journalists working for CBS News on Monday firmly secured the Iraq war as the deadliest conflict for reporters in modern times."

It's important to note that while an estimated 71 journalists have been killed in the war, more than 2,450 American soldiers have died. More than 200 foreign military personnel have been killed. There have been, according to estimates, more than 4,700 Iraqi police and military casualties, and an unknown but certainly significant number of Iraq civilians killed.

Some commenters have complained that CBS News has given too much coverage to its own personnel at the expense of coverage of soldiers. Certainly, their deaths are just two among many, and the tragedy one of countless that have occurred in this war. Douglas and Brolin, along with injured colleague Kimberly Dozier, risked their lives telling the stories of these tragedies, as well as other stories of the war. When they were killed, they were working on a story about how Memorial Day is a day just like any other for American troops.

While there is value in considering the figures, they can never really tell the story of a war. I think Bob Schieffer did a nice job articulating what many at CBS News are feeling last night when he said that "days like today are reminders that this is not about numbers -- each of those numbers is a person, a person that others know or love or depend on."

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Kimberly Dozier has a column up at CBSNews.com where she discusses the challenges faced by journalists in Iraq. Towards the end, she offers up some perspective:

…if we, the journalists, are sitting in hot water, the troops we cover are hopping around on Hell's coals. Even when we spend extended time with them, we face a tiny fraction of their risk.



It's even worse for their Iraqi army and police counterparts, who are getting attacked at even higher rates, with deadlier consequences.



And then you've got the Iraqi people, who never signed up for combat, but are sure seeing a lot of it. And they're not restricted to tours of duty, nor do they have a ticket out.



So yes, absolutely, journalists face awful, dangerous risks in Iraq, more so than almost anyplace else on earth right now.



But it's nothing compared to the people we cover.

That's true, for the most part. Depending on who you ask, between 79 and 101 journalists have been killed in Iraq. While it's extremely difficult to compare the percentage of journalists killed versus the percentage of military or civilians killed, it seems safer to be an American journalist in Iraq than it is to be a soldier, policeman or man on the street. There have been more than 2,200 U.S. military casualties in Iraq alone, and civilian casualties, though difficult to estimate, are thought to be in the tens of thousands.



So why do people like Bob Woodruff and Jill Carroll get so much coverage? For one thing, their stories hit close to home. As Howard Kurtz wrote today, "Every death or injury in Iraq is important, whether it's a journalist or soldier or civilian. But when you know someone, or have talked to someone, just before things take a turn for the worst, it hits home in a very personal way." Police officers are hit particularly hard when one of their own is injured, put at risk, or killed, and journalists are no different. They're more interested in the story and more diligent in their reporting.



Part of the flurry of coverage of journalists in peril also has to do with expectations. A journalist is not a soldier. War correspondents and the people who work with them know the risks they face, but they are not designated combatants. They put themselves at risk in order to perform an essential function – helping people understand the truth on the ground. When journalists are hurt or killed, it has a symbolic meaning as well as a literal consequence. Doug Vogt and Woodruff's injuries suggest that not even the truth, or our best approximation of it, remains safe.

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