Actually most of the cancers and birth defects to date have been showing up in the South of Iraq around Basra, not Baghdad, and have been attributed to the DU ammo used in GW 1. It might take a few years yet before the effects of the latest round of DU contamination from the 2003 invasion starts to show up in more diverse locations across Iraq.
From accounts I've been reading recently most of the Western reporters remain holed up in the Green Zone and don't venture out to do much reporting on their own because of concerns about kidnapping etc. That probably means they are relying on official sources and press briefings etc. even more than usual to get material for their stories. If they go too far in making waves by printing stories the Pentagon or the new Iraqi government feel are "not helpful" there goes their access. No more invites to the press conferences and no more access to the usual sources when they need to call someone to get some information.
Beyond all that, as the following Project Censored story shows, the big media companies are tied into the rest of corporate America, including the defense industries. The editors, producers and executives know which side of their bread is buttered, as shown by their craven toadying and unquestioning regurgitation of White House and Pentagon press releases and Colin Powell's blatant lies to the UN in the runup to the invasion. Bear in mind that if this information about the hazards of DU was widespread throughout the US, it has the potential to cripple the US military's ability to continue recruiting their future cannon fodder. This could even force the US into an unplanned and hasty withdrawal from Iraq, and there would go the Cheney/PNAC/Neocon plans for empire down the tubes in one fell swoop. How many mainstream reporters or editors would be willing to put their necks on the line when the consequences could be so significant? And should they screw up the necessary courage to cover this, would their own bosses even let them proceed?
However, mainstream media no longer produce news for the mainstream population—nor should we consider the media as plural. Instead it is more accurate to speak of big media in the US today as the corporate media and to use the term in the singular tense—as it refers to the singular monolithic top-down power structure of self-interested news giants.
A research team at Sonoma State University has recently finished conducting a network analysis of the boards of directors of the ten big media organizations in the US. The team determined that only 118 people comprise the membership on the boards of director of the ten big media giants. This is a small enough group to fit in a moderate size university classroom. These 118 individuals in turn sit on the corporate boards of 288 national and international corporations. In fact, eight out of ten big media giants share common memberships on boards of directors with each other. NBC and the Washington Post both have board members who sit on Coca Cola and J. P. Morgan, while the Tribune Company, The New York Times and Gannett all have members who share a seat on Pepsi. It is kind of like one big happy family of interlocks and shared interests. The following are but a few of the corporate board interlocks for the big ten media giants in the US:
New York Times:Caryle Group, Eli Lilly, Ford, Johnson and Johnson, Hallmark,
Lehman Brothers, Staples, Pepsi
Washington Post: Lockheed Martin, Coca-Cola, Dun & Bradstreet, Gillette,
G.E. Investments, J.P. Morgan, Moody's
Knight-Ridder: Adobe Systems, Echelon, H&R Block, Kimberly-Clark, Starwood Hotels
The Tribune (Chicago & LA Times): 3M, Allstate, Caterpillar, Conoco Phillips, Kraft,
McDonalds, Pepsi, Quaker Oats, Shering Plough, Wells Fargo
News Corp (Fox): British Airways, Rothschild Investments
GE (NBC): Anheuser-Busch, Avon, Bechtel, Chevron/Texaco, Coca-Cola, Dell, GM,
Home Depot, Kellogg, J.P. Morgan, Microsoft, Motorola, Procter & Gamble,
Disney (ABC): Boeing, Northwest Airlines, Clorox, Estee Lauder, FedEx, Gillette,
Halliburton, Kmart, McKesson, Staples, Yahoo,
Viacom (CBS): American Express, Consolidated Edison, Oracle, Lafarge North America
Gannett: AP, Lockheed-Martin, Continental Airlines, Goldman Sachs, Prudential, Target,
Pepsi,
AOL-Time Warner (CNN): Citigroup, Estee Lauder, Colgate-Palmolive, Hilton
Can we trust the news editors at the Washington Post to be fair and objective regarding news stories about Lockheed-Martin defense contract over-runs? Or can we assuredly believe that ABC will conduct critical investigative reporting on Halliburton's sole-source contracts in Iraq? If we believe the corporate media give us the full un-censored truth about key issues inside the special interests of American capitalism, then we might feel that they are meeting the democratic needs of mainstream America. However if we believe — as increasingly more Americans do— that corporate media serves its own self-interests instead of those of the people, than we can no longer call it mainstream or refer to it as plural. Instead we need to say that corporate media is corporate America, and that we the mainstream people need to be looking at alternative independent sources for our news and information.
http://www.projectcensored.org/newsflash/big_media_interlocks.html