Red=Evil, Blue=Good and Media Partisanship

I thought about this topic for quite some time, never posting. Can’t say why, for sure. Perhaps it’s my ADD or quote possibly early onset Alzheimer’s (my wife says it’s the Amber Ale) but whatever the case, I hadn’t gotten around to posting until tonight… when the topic quietly resurfaced and caught my fancy.

[Another aside, the reason it surfaced was due to the sci-fi books I read. For example, in The Hidden City by David Eddings which I'm currently finished up, the final battle is fought by the primordial opposing forces—one representing good, the Bhelliom, and the other representing evil, Klael. After a brief physical match they break down to their elemental light and gas forms and... like most literary pieces I've ever read, including Star Wars light sabers, the good is blue and the evil red.]

So this reminded me of the whole Red State/Blue State topic in politics. Ask someone today which political party is Red and they’ll say Republicans, with the Democrats being blue. But it hasn’t always been that way.

So when the switch and why? This from Wikipedia:

Early on, some channels used a scheme of red for Democrats and blue for Republicans. The first television news network to use colors to depict the states won by presidential candidates was NBC. In 1976, John Chancellor, the anchorman for the NBC Nightly News, asked his network’s engineers to construct a large electronic map of the USA. The map was placed in the network’s election-night news studio. If Jimmy Carter, the Democratic candidate that year, won a state it would light up in red; if Gerald Ford, the Republican, carried a state it would light up in blue. The feature proved to be so popular that four years later all three major television networks would use colors to designate the states won by the presidential candidates. NBC continued to use the color scheme employed in 1976 for several years; NBC newsman David Brinkley famously referred to the 1980 election map as showing Ronald Reagan’s 44-state landslide as a “sea of blue”.[6] CBS, from 1984 on, used the opposite scheme—blue for Democrats, red for Republicans. ABC used yellow for one major party and blue for the other in 1976. However, in 1980 and 1984, ABC used red for Republicans and blue for Democrats. As late as 1996, there was still no universal association of one color with one party.[7] If anything, by 1996, color schemes were relatively mixed, as CNN, CBS, ABC, and The New York Times referred to Democratic states with the color blue and Republican ones as red, while Time Magazine and the Washington Post used an opposite scheme.[8][9][10]

So it began with the Republicans as the blue party. I’m not the only one who’s caught the switch. Along the way, someone in the media realized their opportunity to make the change and now it’s generally accepted by the public; complete with the underlying, hidden meaning that if the Republicans are red, they must be evil.

Very sneaky.