Today on Reliable Sources with Howard Kurtz, the subject of NBC’s decision to call the Iraq conflict a civil war was discussed with NBC’s Richard Engel, Project for Excellence in Journalism’s Mark Jurkowitz, “The Washington Post’s” Rajiv Chandrasekaran and CNN’s Arwa Damon. Transcript follows…

KURTZ: Joining us now in Baghdad, CNN International Correspondent Arwa Damon. In Beirut, Richard Engel, NBC’s Middle East bureau chief. Here in Washington, Mark Jurkowitz, associate director of the Project of Excellence in Journalism. And Rajiv Chandrasekaran, assistant managing editor and former Baghdad bureau chief of “The Washington Post” and author of “Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone.”

Richard Engel, why did NBC make this declaration of a civil war? I didn’t know that networks had foreign policies. And how do you respond to critics such as CBS executive producer Rome Hartman, who said this was a political statement by the network and not a news judgment?

RICHARD ENGEL, NBC NEWS: Thank you for having me, Howard.

I’m here in Beirut. As you can see behind me there are some demonstrations ongoing. So I’ll try and talk over them.

I don’t think that decision to call it a civil war was politically motivated at all. I think it was very much driven by what the reports are coming from the ground, what I’m reporting in Baghdad when I’m there, what our military analysts are seeing, and what Iraqis themselves are saying. They believe that it is a civil war and that Iraqis have been calling it that for about a year now.

You have sectarian violence at a level that is organized. You have competing factions that are — that have very distinct political goals. The Sunnis are fighting for their own survival. They believe that they have no future in Iraq as long as this current government is in power.

So it is not just a situation on the ground that is unorganized chaos while driven by criminals. You have political and militant groups fighting it out at a very efficient, militarized level, and I think that’s what led the — led us at NBC to start calling it a civil war.

KURTZ: Mark Jurkowitz, FOX News put out a statement on this saying that, “Some are using the term ‘civil war’ to indicate failure, not inside Iraq, but on U.S. policy in Iraq. We’re unwilling to fall into that tender trap. We’re not using the term because there are non-Iraqis in the fray, and that makes it something different.”

MARK JURKOWITZ, PROJECT FOR EXCELLENCE IN JOURNALISM: Well, it’s a semantic battle right now, and it’s fascinating to watch. The NBC issue and having Matt Lauer sort of front their policy here, I’m not sure that there’s substantive disagreement so much with what NBC did, because there are a lot of other media outlets, including “The New York Times” and “Los Angeles Times,” that have been calling this civil war.

There’s sort of a sense of — there’s a question of whether it was grandstanding or not. I think that’s sort of the issue among the media right now.

KURTZ: They didn’t just start using the term. They made this big announcement, some of which we saw just a moment ago.

Rajiv, is civil war a reasonable description of what’s going on in Iraq? And if so, why is “The Washington Post” not using the term?

RAJIV CHANDRASEKARAN, “WASHINGTON POST”: Well, I think it is, and I think “The Post” has sort of approached it in two different ways.

On the editorial pages, “The Post” has been, I think, a little bit more liberal, if you will, in using the term “civil war,” but in the news columns it has left it up to reporters and editors. And you see the phraseology sort of imminent civil war, or escalating civil war, but not sort of a formal declaration like that.

I just feel here, Howie, that the debate over the terminology really just is a distraction from the real issue here, which is, how do you deal with the conflict between the Sunnis and Shiites? And I think that the White House is — and other elements in this country, their lack of accepting the term, I think, leads us down a path where policy is not always as focused on addressing that important subject.

KURTZ: No matter what we call it a lot of people are dying there.

Arwa Damon, CNN says it’s just following the debate over the use of the term “civil war.” Is that a term that you would feel comfortable using in your reports?

ARWA DAMON, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, I mean, look, there are certain realities here that you cannot deny. You cannot deny the numbers of people that are dying on both sides. You cannot deny the ever-increasing number of bodies that are showing up at the morgue, all that have died horrific deaths.

You cannot deny the real they Iraqis are out there every day, some are carrying two I.D. cards, one Sunni, one Shia. You cannot deny the ethnic cleansing that is happening.

I mean, in terms of whether it’s a civil war or not, we have that debate all of the time amongst ourselves as journalists here with our Iraqi staff, with members of the Iraqi government. And you tend to see the shift where members of the Iraqi government and the U.S. administration are not comfortable and are not going to be calling it a civil war, for the most part, because that does admit a certain amount of defeat. But when you speak with the Iraqi people, if we’re going to listen to their voices, increasingly they are calling this a civil war, and they’re saying that it happened a long time ago.

KURTZ: Right.

Richard Engel, this seems to be the week for leaked memos. First we had that memo from National security Adviser Stephen Hadley, leaked to “The New York Times,” which came out during the president’s visit with Prime Minister Maliki in Jordan in which Hadley talked about how Maliki was either ignorant, or misrepresenting his position, or incapable of bringing the violence under control. And this morning in “The New York Times” and some other papers, Don Rumsfeld — let me just get a look at that here. The memo was leaked.

He wrote this just before the election. “In my view,” says the defense secretary, “it is time for a major adjustment. Clearly, what U.S. forces are currently doing in Iraq is not working well enough or fast enough.”

My question do you is, does this show that administration officials have been misleading journalists all along with some of their public, upbeat descriptions of Iraq?

ENGEL: I think it shows that the message of “stay the course,” at least within the White House, has been discredited for some time.

The war in Iraq has change several times. What we’re — what the American soldiers are fighting in right now and what we are seeing as reporters in Iraq is not the same war that it began with.

In the initial phases, it was a very clear conflict with American forces entering Iraq and trying to topple the government. Then there was one to try and stabilize the country so they could hold elections. Then we see a counterinsurgency, and now we’ve entered yet a new phase. What I think we are — what the White House officials in these memos are acknowledging, that the military has entered a new phase of the conflict and that a new strategy is needed, one that, unfortunately, has not been clearly voiced up until now.

KURTZ: Just briefly, Richard, which side of the Lebanon conflict are those demonstrators behind you on?

ENGEL: Yes. Right now they are mostly pro-Hezbollah supporters. They are demanding that the government of Lebanon, which is pro- American, be toppled, and that these supporters be given more power in the state.

It is also connected to the situation in Iraq in that there is a great power struggle under way between the Syrians and the Iranians on one side, who are supporting these demonstrators here on the streets, and the U.S., which is putting forth its vision for a new Middle East, who are supporting the prime minister. The prime minister’s office is just a few blocks from here. The prime minister has been staying at his offices, along with eight other ministers who are spending the night in the building, fearing assassination attempts.

KURTZ: Right.

ENGEL: So there are — there is a debate over Middle East policy being played out right in the streets behind me here.

KURTZ: Mark Jurkowitz, we find out now what some administration officials really think, the Rumsfeld memo, the Hadley memo. Is there a credibility gap emerging here?

JURKOWITZ: Well, first of all, I think what we’re finding out here is that defeat is an orphan. And I think we have a lot of people who don’t want to claim parentage anymore. That’s the feeling that we’re getting this week.

I think there’s a sense exacerbated by media coverage as well. Colin Powell called it a civil war, for example, this week. You get a sense that the sort of — the political structure around the war is kind of crumbling, and I think it’s a measure of how far we’ve gone on this.

Despite what Sean Hannity said, a while ago the argument really was — against the media was you’re not showing the positive things. Now the only argument is, it sectarian violence, is it a violent insurgency, or is it civil war? We’re down to debating semantics, not sort of the level of what’s going on here.

KURTZ: The president often denounces leaks of classified information. This Hadley memo was classified, but no denunciation this time because “The New York Times” said it came from an administration official.

So you see a little bit of a double standard there?

CHANDRASEKARAN: Totally. I mean, when it suits the purposes, information is leaked out. And I think clearly here you have the administration wanting to put some pressure on Prime Minister Maliki and using “The New York Times” to do so.

KURTZ: So you believe this is a deliberate orchestration of putting this information out?

CHANDRASEKARAN: I believe it was. I believe that it was the result of good, aggressive reporting by Michael Gordon at “The New York Times,” but I think the administration also saw a political benefit from putting some pressure on Maliki in the public sphere. I think this was all calculated.

KURTZ: Arwa Damon, we have been told publicly, at least, that reports of strains between the Bush administration and the Iraqi government were overblown, perhaps exaggerated by the press. Now that we have these memos, I’m wondering if we’re getting a better — if journalists are getting a better, clearer picture of reality.

DAMON: I think we are. I think most certainly at least what those memos have served to do is to echo and reemphasize what we have been hearing on the streets of Iraq for quite some time now.

We have been reporting how Iraqis feel about their government, the lack of faith they have in their government, the lack of faith they have in Nuri al-Maliki’s ability to lead them. At least what we’re seeing right now is an echoing of what we’ve been hearing on the Iraqi street. A lot of things that both — not just from Iraqis, but senior U.S. and Iraqi officials here are being re-emphasized by this memo.

KURTZ: Richard Engel, top administration officials, as you well know, have repeatedly criticized correspondents like you for painting an unnecessarily negative picture of what’s going on in Iraq, staying in the Green Zone, and all of that. Now that this — even the private doubts and reservations of the White House and the Pentagon are coming out, do you feel vindicated?

ENGEL: No. It’s been very frustrating all along to be at the receiving end of that criticism with acquisitions like we just spend all of our time in the Green Zone.

For the record, neither your reporters, Arwa Damon right now in Baghdad, or almost any of the reporters who cover Iraq do so from the Green Zone, but go out every day either with the U.S. military or driving around the city of Baghdad. And to say that we somehow have been just lazy and picking up bad reports to try to make the American mission in Iraq somehow seem like a failure is inaccurate. It’s also, in some degree, dangerous.

I mean, I know reporters, colleagues of mine who have received so much criticism over the last three and a half, four years, that they felt they’ve had something to prove. And so they put themselves in extraordinarily dangerous situations. And I know one reporter who was kidnapped as a result of it.

So it’s not a sense of vindication, but it is good that people are finally starting to finally see that the situation in Iraq is tremendously difficult, and it is not just reporters who are looking for bad — bad news stories.

KURTZ: Right.

ENGEL: Iraqis have repeatedly told me time and time again that it’s much worse than it appears on television.

KURTZ: Rajiv, when you were in Baghdad, and as an editor, did you resent the criticism that journalists were providing a distorted picture and perhaps afraid of going out into the provinces?

CHANDRASEKARAN: I sure did. I mean, look, we were out there, I think, getting out and about far more than most American officials, who were in many cases cloistered in the Green Zone. I write a lot about that in my book.

You know, many of the American diplomats and reconstruction workers were really confined to Baghdad. They were getting out and really getting just a soda straw view of the country, whereas you had reporters who were wearing head-to-toe black burkas and getting in Iraqi clothing, finding other creative ways to get around and see what was happening in the country.

And when you’d hear these comments saying that we were just confined to our hotel rooms, you know, I was very close at some points to just sending an open letter out to American officials saying, “If you’d like to come and spend a week embedded with me, I’ll show you around the country.”

KURTZ: Interesting divide among the newsweeklies. New issues out today. Let’s put up the covers.

The “TIME” cover says the Iraq Study Group says “It’s Time for an Exit Strategy. Why Bush Will Listen.” But “Newsweek” has a question mark, “Will Bush Listen?”

So I guess we’ll find out in the coming weeks which of these magazines is going in the right direction.

When we come back, are the media just scratching the surface when it comes to the rawness of the violence in Iraq?

Coming up 11:00 a.m. Eastern, U.S. ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad joins “LATE EDITION WITH WOLF BLITZER.”

And at 1:00 p.m. Eastern, John Roberts hosts “THIS WEEK AT WAR.”

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KURTZ: You’re looking at shots of Beirut right there, where anti-government demonstrators have taken to the streets in large numbers to protest against the Lebanese government, where we go to NBC’s Richard Engel.

You wrote on your blog this week that what’s happening between Sunnis and Shia in Iraq is ethnic cleansing. You say your best friend’s wife hasn’t left the house in six months. You touched on this earlier.

If television isn’t capturing the full horror of what’s going on in that country, why not?

ENGEL: It’s become very difficult for reporters to go to areas like the Anbar Province, or even — even with the military. If you are embedded with the U.S. Marines in Ramadi or Falluja, effectively you’re on a combat mission or you’re on some sort of brief mission to go meet a local official and then to pull out.

It’s almost impossible to spend a great amount of time in these — in these dangerous cities to describe what Iraqi witnesses tell us what is going. They come to our offices, all of them have horror stories.

Almost all of our reporters who come from places like Diyala and the Anbar Province all have relatives who have been — who have been killed, other relatives who have been kidnapped. People are fleeing the country. So it is often very difficult to get the images out of places like this and turn them into television reporting.

KURTZ: Arwa Damon in Baghdad, do you share some of the same frustrations in terms of where you can go, what you can report without unduly risking your life?

DAMON: Absolutely. All the time.

I think that is one of the more frustrating things with being a reporter trying to cover Iraq right now, is, first of all, your lack of ability to just move around and figure out exactly what is going in this country. In terms of the violence, when events happen, we can’t go out to that location on site anymore and do our own news gathering. We’re increasingly reliant on our Iraqi staff, on our Iraqi stringers. And they’re really the ones that are bearing the brunt of the reporting here for us and take the most risks.

Plus, add to that just the reality that so much happens here that people don’t even hear about. You hear the horror stories afterwards speaking to your friends, and there are few people, Iraqis that are here right now, that don’t have some sort of a horror story that has either happened to their family or someone who they know.

KURTZ: Right.

DAMON: It’s really very difficult to get a grasp on the full picture of what is happening here.

KURTZ: Mark Jurkowitz, Iraq is a huge story right now, but it has faded in and out of the news depending on other things that are going on.

Are the media suffering from Iraq fatigue?

JURKOWITZ: On some level I think they are. And I think the public is, too. And that’s why on some level I think that the whole argument on civil war is a little bit of a semantics debate.

You know, they say a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, we’ve seen the pictures from Iraq, and they’ve been steady and they’ve made the same point for some time now. There’s an incredible level of violence, it’s seeped in, I think, to the American public. I think it was reflected on Election Day.

I don’t think that the American public cares whether it’s called a civil war, an insurgency, or anything like that. I think they’ve got an overall picture from the media coverage. We’ve been knowing for a while that this is a mess, and we’re almost in a way sort of tired of seeing it.

KURTZ: And if that’s true, Rajiv, when you were a reporter there, when you’re an editor now, how do you make today’s suicide bombing, 50 Iraqis killed in a marketplace, sound different than yesterday’s or last week’s?

CHANDRASEKARAN: I think you try to find new angles into it and try to write about the lives of average Iraqi people.

As Richard and Arwa were saying, I mean, just the very difficult conditions people there have to live with, you know, carrying two sets of I.D. cards, the fact that almost everybody has a relative, a friend, a neighbor who has suffered, who has been either killed or kidnapped, those are the sorts of stories that we’re now trying to get on to the front page of the newspaper. Just the, you know, X numbers of people killed in today’s attack, it’s very tough for those stories to rise to the nightly news or to the front page of “The Washington Post.”

KURTZ: Right. Body count journalism is getting a little repetitive.

Thanks very much, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Mark Jurkowitz, Arwa Damon in Baghdad, Richard Engel for NBC in Beirut.

We appreciate it.