Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Scott Whitlock was so triggered by a color on a map that he devoted an entire April 8 post to ranting about it (boldface his):
Talk about fake history. CBS Sunday Morning on April 7 featured a story on the Reconstruction era after the Civil War and former slaves who entered Congress in the 1870s. The visuals for the CBS segment used the political “red and blue” state graphics. But instead of following actual history, the network made the slave-holding Confederates red and the union states blue. It should be the other way around.
Correspondent Mo Rocca explained, “After returning home to Beaufort, South Carolina, Robert Smalls was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.One of more than a dozen African Americans to serve in Congress during the period known as Reconstruction, when the formerly rebel states were reabsorbed into the union and four million newly freed Africans were made citizens.”
As he talked, the CBS visuals showed the red Confederate states melting into the newly blue America. In reality, the Confederacy was made up of Democrats. It was Abraham Lincoln’s Republicans who fought to preserve the union and end slavery.
[...]
Credit to Rocca for at least getting this right (vocally) as he spoke. Referring to the African American members of Congress after the Civil War, Rocca noted, “All of them southerners, all of them Republicans in 1872.”
But apparently CBS’s graphic department couldn’t get this right.
Whitlock is apparently so inculcated by his anti-media work at the MRC that he has not considered the possibility that perhaps the CBS graphics department was not imposing modern political color meanings onto its map -- it was just after two contrasting colors, and red and blue are the two most prominent contrasting colors.
And even if one does accept Whitlock's conspiracy theory that CBS deliberate chose those colors with political motivation, it's worth pointing out that there's an element of truth given that Republicans currently dominatethe South and are primarily the ones defending Confederate monuments from removal.
