Topic: Media Research Center
Last year, Media Research Center writer Scott Whitlock had a meltdown because a "CBS Sunday Morning" segment about the Reconstruction period after the Civil War used a map in which the former Confederate states were colored in red, even though "the Confederacy was made up of Democrats," who are apparently supposed to be blue. (Of course, Whitlock didn't mention that the Democrats of the Reconstruction period have morphed into the Republicans of today.) Well, Whitlock has melted down again over another map in a June 13 post:
The History Channel in late May produced a mostly laudable documentary series on Ulysses S. Grant, rightly hailing the legacy of the victorious Union general and the president who fought for civil rights. However, the series contained what’s become a recurring problem in some historical reflections on the Civil War. Throughout the three part series, the production repeatedly showed the slave-holding Confederates as red states and the Union north as blue states. In reality, it's the reverse.
As anyone familiar with history knows, the Confederates were Democrats. It was Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party that fought the war to preserve the union and ultimately to end slavery. As Marine and retired U.S. Army War College professor Daniel Douds astutely explained Grant’s strategy to defeat the Confederates, the on-screen graphic showcased the (incorrect) blue state/red state dynamic.
[...]
Now, a charitable person might say the choices were unintentional and not meant to associate modern red states with slavery. But if so, why not just use blue and gray, the actual colors of Civil War uniforms?
Note that Whitlock invokes the shopworn "liberal media" conspiracy here; after all, his long MRC tenure means he is well marinated in perpetuating that narrative, so he plays thet conspiracy card first and only later avers the "charitable" thought that it's not a conspiracy. But once again, this is a guy who's being triggered by colors on a map, and again, he doesn't acknowledge that the Democrats of the Civil War era have become the Republicans of today -- which would make the map colors ultimately accurate.
The fact that Whitlock thinks map colors is such a winning issue that he's written about it twice in a year tells you how little the MRC cares about actual "media research" and is much more about finding ever-more-obscure ways of trying to own the libs.
