Nah. It's a result of the same sort of 'rush to the presses/airwaves' that gives us junk science. A scientific finding needs to be rigorously peer reviewed before it should ever be mentioned to the public. The way it works now though is a scientist is out there doing interviews with New Scientist magazine before he's ever submitted his work for review.
The result is, you hear something trumpeted over and over again by several different news sources who are all trying to out-do one another and later, perhaps the scientist's claims don't pan out under peer review.
Same here on the battlefield. Truth be told, the public should never have heard of those shells until they were put to rigorous testing. You get a positive on the site with crude tests- the reporter runs out and tells the world. Conservatives have been holding their breath waiting for the WMD to turn up and they grasp at the news willingly. Turns out after rigorous tests, it was a false positive. Suddenly, it looks like someone's trying to rig the game.
The entity rigging the game is the media. They do it to scoop the other guy but they do no service to the public when they act so. They do it for money, not your well being.
Personally, I don't sit around and fret about the WMD. They were never high on my list of priorities for taking Saddam out. There were other more important reasons. We've taken him down, this is all that matters to me.