From WNYKRC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone. All told the events that unfolded in Iraq over the last week made it one of the most dramatic of the war so far.

We saw the restaurant where Saddam was rumored to be dining reduced to rubble.

We saw American troops advance into the center of Baghdad. We saw both the

statues and the regime of Saddam Hussein toppled. And in the chaos, this.

2.24 a.m. The Al Jazeera Network reports its reporter, Tariq Ayub, has died after being injured

this morning when a U.S. airstrike hit a building housing Arab media.

358 a.m. 4 Arab networks report loud explosions around the Palestine Hotel, where many international journalists are staying.

There are reports at least five journalists are injured.

The Pentagon says sniper fire was coming from the hotel.

When the smoke cleared, we learned that two journalists at the Palestine Hotel had been killed

and five more seriously injured.

The reporter's death toll in this conflict now stands at 12.

Based on that figure, the L.A. Times did some heart-stopping math.

Here's a quote.

In the 21 years between 1954 when the French were

defeated in Indochina and 1975, when the combat stopped in Vietnam, 63 journalists were killed.

If the conflict in Iraq were to last as long as the war in Southeast Asia and current

casualty rates remained constant,

4,368 journalists would die.

Representatives of editors in 115 countries have since written to Donald Rumsfeld

to condemn the, quote, inexcusable and reckless American attacks on journalists.

...