When the leftist media has to choose between dead workers and endangered birds the birds get coverage

Media: What does it say when 11 men who perish on an exploding oil platform, or 30 poor souls who die in a 1,000-year Tennessee flood, get less coverage than two oil-soaked birds? It says news is driven from the left.

It is to the credit of the one media outlet that reported the paparazzi-like scrums of reporters trailing rescue workers as they tried to clean off one oil-soaked gannet caught in the oil spill off Louisiana waters after a rig exploded in the Gulf on April 20. Not only did the U.S. and European media obsess breathlessly about the bird, and later about a brown pelican that followed, they seemed to be panting for more.

That's because birds are convenient tools for driving the radical green agenda to halt all oil drilling. TV media and the national papers pounded the bird story because it served a political purpose.

It's getting obvious that that's the pattern: A parallel example is in the media coverage of combat deaths in Afghanistan. During the Bush years, the media reported deaths of soldiers daily because it advanced an anti-war agenda. With President Obama now at the helm, they've dropped coverage.

A look at the Los Angeles Times' oil spill coverage, for one, shows birds featured daily in its blog and paper while the 11 oil platform workers have barely registered. On the blog, the news of the deaths wasn't acknowledged until May 5, eight days after the workers' employer identified them in a memorial Web site.

Is this important? Yes. Regardless of the worries about the birds, the workers' deaths are more tragic and have more implications for society. But as people, they hardly serve an agenda.

The bird obsession looks even worse when one looks north to the flooding that's engulfed two-thirds of Tennessee and its neighbors in a natural environmental disaster. On May 1, the region suffered its biggest floods in 500 years. Nashville was almost underwater. The death toll continues to climb. The regional economy will take a $1.5 billion hit.

The Associated Press has done some excellent team coverage of these events, but it hasn't been featured much in national news, nor in major newspapers. Tennessee's floods made a single-column story on the last page of section of the May 6 L.A. Times.

It's a shame to see these stories buried. The news reflects the values of the media outlets, and unfortunately, a radical agenda drives it. That's not reflective of what matters in the real America out there, however, and goes to show a disconnect between what's important to readers and what matters to the left.