Maybe. Heck, maybe even probably (do I hear an 'undoubtedly'?). Their track record on being skeptical of U.S. government claims about adversaries does not inspire optimism, writes Lawrence Martin.

From the Oct. 29 Globe and Mail column: (behind a paywall; must be a subscriber)

Journalists must start from the perspective that American governments, not just George W. Bush's, have a history of demonizing the enemy. It's called threat inflation and it's a political tool that has been used repeatedly to suck in the press.

Think back to the early fifties and Paul Nitze's hyped document, NSC-68, which wildly exaggerated the Soviet arsenal. Then came John F. Kennedy and allegations of a so-called missile gap with the Soviets - one that never existed. Under Lyndon Johnson came the trumped-up Gulf of Tonkin incident that was used to trigger escalation in Vietnam. Ronald Reagan turned Nicaragua's ragtag Sandinista rebels into a force capable of descending with ferocious force on Washington.

On Iraq, the media (not all of us bought in) generally accepted Colin Powell's list of bogus allegations put before the United Nations. There were UN inspectors on the ground with a different story, but the media swallowed the political propaganda. There was very little reporting on how the policy of containment had worked in the previous decade, how Saddam's armies had been substantially weakened, how he hadn't swatted a flea outside his own borders in that time. Hardly anyone mentioned how Saddam did, in fact, have WMDs in the Gulf War, but didn't even bother to use them.