If they'd been on the ball and unafraid of criticizing radical religionists TODAY as opposed to hundreds or thousands of years ago, they would have been warning us about the potential for 9/11.
Now, they CAN'T do that because while they are so casual in berating others for cowardice of various kinds (political, moral) they are afraid of having their newspapers boycotted or their offices burned.
So, instead of their cheerful bashing of Christianity which they so gleefully did in the 80's onward (televangelists being the norm, if you believe them), they talk about "radicalism" of ALL sorts, a nice one-size-fits-all definition that allows them to pretend to be covering what's really important in the world while still allowing them to bash Judeo-Christian believers.
Most media types are so hamstrung by their hatred for Judaism and/or Christianity that they don't even know it, so they of course can't correct it. And it blinds them to the reality, which is that western civilization is under fire. But to admit this would mean they would be the targets of something worse than radical Islam--they would be vulnerable to snarky comments at their next wine-sipping gathering, where some dweeb fellow liberal would say "I'll bet George Bush was glad to see your column this morning."
They know who the REAL bad guy is today--not Al Qaeda, not Islam, but George Bush, his advisors, and the US fighting men and women.
One of the reasons for this is that, as secular humanists, they are unable to have the thought: "Well, on the one hand, this religion gets it right about the Son of God while that religion is wrong." They don't even see how that is relevant.
So they treat it as an exercise in deconstructionist, relative Anthropology, which requires that all benefit of the doubt be given to brown-skinned, non-Western religions and that only skepticism be expressed about Christianity.
But when God is actually in the equation, Anthropology is irrelevant.