US: The President may say he still "respectfully disagrees" with the hundreds of thousands of anti-war activists who took to the streets last month, but other influential people are having second thoughts. Paul Cullen reports from San Francisco.
The US media, in particular its newspapers, have been going through a period of heart-searching after being taken by surprise by the volume of protest at home and abroad. As a result, editorial writers have started taking a notably more cautious line on the Bush administration's plans for war.
Other journalists have questioned whether the peace movement received adequate coverage in the months before the big demonstrations in New York, San Francisco and other US cities.
As Paul Krugman, a columnist for the New York Times, wrote last week: "Some media outlets - operating in an environment in which anyone who questions the administration's foreign policy is accused of being unpatriotic - have taken it as their assignment to sell the war, not to present a mix of information that might call the justification for war into question."
In particular, the two main cable news networks (CNN and its upstart rival, Fox) "have acted as if the decision to invade Iraq has already been made and have in effect seen it as their job to prepare the American public for the coming war".
Media analysts have established that the television coverage of Iraq since September has been driven mainly by the administration's actions. It was a similar story in the newspapers, where only a fraction of stories up to last month dealt with anti-war protesters or the motivation of other western countries.
The media ran with the frequent briefings from the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department, in part because these were easy to cover.
This helps to explain the disparity in views between Americans and Europeans; why Europeans are more likely to ask "why war?", "why now?" and "why Iraq?", while Americans say "let's get on with it".
Not that the current round of French-bashing has entirely died out; while one New York paper produced a photo-montage of French diplomats as weasels, there have been endless stories about restaurants refusing to serve French wine or fast-food joints renaming french fries as "freedom fries".
Some anti-war protesters were so frustrated by the lack of media coverage that they pooled resources to buy newspaper ads and television airtime. A group of Democrats ran a full-page ad in the Los Angeles Times asking: "Who's against a US War on Iraq?" and answering "2 out of 3 Americans. 7 out of 8 Brits. 1 out of 1 Popes".
Yoko Ono aired her views on peace in a full-page display in the New York Times. Activists bypassed the traditional media to send out garner support for protest marches, using chain e-mails, mailing lists and independent websites. (Text messaging for some reason has not caught on here.)
This highlights a traditional challenge for the media - how to hang on to its audience. The war in Iraq is coming in a period of turmoil for many media outlets and not all are well equipped to meet the challenge.
Covering the looming conflict will cost a television network $2 to $4 million a week, one cable news executive has estimated. CNN, which made its name in the Gulf War but has recently been overtaken in the ratings by Fox, has budgeted $35 million.
However, most viewers still take their news from the three main broadcast networks, ABC, CBS and NBC.
Ironically, when war starts, the cash-rich American networks could find themselves scooped by the Qatar-based Arab-language station Al-Jazeera, which seems to have a direct line to Osama bin Laden. But even Al-Jazeera is facing stiff competition this time from four rival Gulf-based pretenders to its throne.
US newspapers are also throwing huge resources into their coverage. The Washington Post says it already has 58 journalists in and around Iraq, all equipped with expensive flak jackets and chemical and biological warfare suits.
In spite of current fretting about coverage on Iraq, changes are set to reduce even further the diversity of the US media.
The powerful Federal Communications Commission - chaired by Colin Powell's son Michael - is about to usher in the biggest bout of deregulation since the Reagan era.
Powell wants to drop a number of ownership rules, including the ban on newspapers owning TV stations and on media conglomerates owning two networks.
Limits on market share and ownership of radio stations will also be raised or abolished.
The argument is that technological change, especially the blurring of the lines between different media including the Internet, will make current rules redundant. But the likely outcome is a further monopolisation of the media, with big corporations more interested in the bottom line than investment in news.
The reality is that most Americans are already starved of choice.
A town like Buffalo in upstate New York has 500,000 inhabitants but only one newspaper; most of its radio stations are owned by the same chain, which has replaced news with music and has carefully segmented the audience between different age groups.