This soggy implication has been floating around the right-wing blogosphere, as well as AM talk radio, for more than a week now: The national press didn't pay sufficient attention to the historic flood that ravaged Nashville and middle Tennessee over the May 1-2 weekend. Why? Because liberal reporters, editors and producers don't care about red states and collectively turned their backs on a very big, important national disaster story.

Of course, for anyone who knows anything about journalism and news gathering, the claim makes no sense. But let's flip it around and ask this question: Why did the conservative press do such a poor job covering the tragic Nashville flood? Why did Fox News and the Washington Times and the New York Post, for instance, pay so little attention to struggling Tennesseans? Using the right-wing logic, should we then begin to raise doubts about the motivations of editors and producers at those news organizations? Did their failure to give the flood story enough attention reveal their deep-seated bias against flood victims and/or country music?

Before I detail just how poorly those proudly conservative outlets did in the covering the Nashville flood, let me just say that I actually agree with critics who called out the national press corps for not doing a good job with the sweeping story. To me, the flood story seemed badly, and at times criminally, underplayed.

At Newsweek, Andrew Romono recently offered up two possible reasons why he think the story got short-changed. First, there was so much chatter about the BP oil spill and the botched Times Square attack, that today's press isn't really able to focus on more than two big stories at once. And second, the Nashville narrative wasn't compelling enough; not enough twists and turns.

I have a hard time buying either suggestion, especially for a TV culture that traditionally loves covering natural disaster stories that produce extraordinary human suffering, the way the Nashville catastrophe did. So I'm still generally perplexed by the news media's oversight. (And I think the botched coverage raises important questions) But I am sure the collective miscue didn't have anything to do with liberal bias.

How do I know? Because journalists for openly conservative media outlets did an even worse job of covering the horrific flooding. The numbers don't lie. Using TVeyes.com, I searched “Nashville flood” to see how many segments with those key words had been aired on cable news channels since May 1. Here are the results:

MSNBC: 23

Fox News: 53

CNN: 103.

That's right, as best I can tell, the supposedly liberal CNN aired twice as many Nashville floor reports as red state-friendly Fox News.

Take a look at the print tallies, via a similar “Nashville” “flood” search of Nexis:

Washington Times: 0

New York Post: 2

Washington Post: 7

New York Times: 13.

Combined, the 'left-wing' NY Times and WashPost published ten times as many Nashville flood stories as the proudly conservative WashTimes and NY Post.

UPDATED: In a truly tasteless move, right-wing country singer Charlie Daniels posts an essay at NewsBusters, where he not only complains about the lack of flood coverage, but also suggests Nashville residents didn't whine about the event or look for government help, like those in New Orleans after Katrina. (Fact: Katrina killed nearly 1,800 people in New Orleans vs. 10 died in the Nashville flood.)

Daniels also implies that Nashville victims, unlike those in New Orleans, prayed in the wake of flood.

Just disgraceful.