After they were caught with their pants down, national media scrambled to direct coverage onto the Spanish radio stations that propelled half a million people into the streets standing up for illegal immigrants’ rights over the past week.

Everybody seemed surprised that the media – Mexican radio – was able to garner the enthusiasm infused into the mass protests of the proposed legislation. The legislation, under the Sensenbrenner bill, would make illegal immigration a felony.

The Los Angeles Times led with a story about the radio stations and the Washington Post fronted an Associated Press about it on their Web site. (The New York Times focused on Lou Dobbs and his argument that illegal immigrants end up costing the U.S. a fortune.)

Why was everyone shocked? White media did the same thing for the Minuteman Project last year, covering the story to death and driving up membership. Every major media in the country wrote stories about the armed protesters with guns coming to the border.

In the end, the news media created the story themselves, pumping it up on the front pages then reporting what a widespread brand the Minuteman Project became.

Mexican media covered the story from the caza-migrante angle while every podunk backwater paper in the Western Hemisphere seemed to send reporters down to localize the senior citizens sitting in lawnchairs along Bisbee Junction’s Border Road.

The difference is the Mexican radio stations played an overt role for the protests, which says something about their advocacy roles in their communities.

Last year’s big event centered around the guns the protesters would wear.

Frankly, it seemed every reporter on the border was waiting for somebody to get shot. When that didn’t happen, the localizing of the issue began in earnest. Editors spent big money to send them down to the border and they goddamn well had to have something to show for it.

So why the big news this time around? Don’t any reporters listen to the radio?

The same protests were held in Chicago and Washington, D.C. two weeks ago and received minimal AP mentions in the newspapers. New Mexico State University’s Frontera News Service spanked U.S. media with a “Media Black Out” story from that big miss.

What’s also interesting is the numbers. Event attendance is one of the stupidest, but vital, games there is.

Organizers told the Times a million people showed up. Police said they counted half that number with their helicopters.

It’s a game, one that any reporter should be able to eliminate with a rough head count but never seem to be able to do. Okay, counting a million people is kind of hard, but you see it done with just about all event-driven coverage.

For more than a year, the vigilantes claimed thousands of people would show up for their April rally. Sometimes 50 showed up. Once I counted 100.

Reporters breathlessly wrote the numbers the organizers gave them. 1,000 people. No! 10,000! 10,000!

It’ll be interesting to watch the next act. The Minuteman Project is already pumping up its call to duty on its Web site.

Who else is going to step up?