Commentary: Color scheme

WASHINGTON, March 21 (UPI) -- In Washington, punditry is big business.

For many years there have been complaints that political reporters inject their biases into their stories. Books have been written on the subject and several academics, most notably Robert Lichter of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, have become well known through efforts to prove the point empirically.

The three cable news channels -- Fox, MSNBC and CNN -- provide an around-the-clock mix of news, analysis and commentary. Many of the more recognizable journalists in American today, like Bill O'Reilly and Fred Barnes on Fox and Robert Novak and Mark Shields on CNN, spend more of their time explaining why something happened in Washington than reporting on what occurred.

They shape the attitudes of the country and can move issues to the head of the line. Anyone who doubts this would do well to study the evolution of the current debate over campaign finance regulation.

The punditocracy, as someone once labeled it, has a shorthand all its own. It uses sound bites -- little snippets of language packed with meaning -- in talking the American people. The phrase "campaign finance reform," for example, metamorphosed into a synonym for the specific legislation -- Shays-Meehan in the House and McCain-Feingold in the Senate -- being considered.

The concept and the legislation are not the same thing but, for all intents and purposes, they might as well be. Other proposed reforms, like that advocated by columnist George Will and proposed by Rep. John Doolittle, R-Calif., were ignored or labeled not serious and shunted aside.

Their push to replace the current system with one based on three principles -- no cash, no foreign money and full disclosure -- may have merit. It did not receive serious consideration, at least in part, because it diverged so dramatically from the punditocracy's definition of "campaign finance reform."

There is another shorthand, originating in the 2000 presidential post-election reporting, that gives me greater pause. It is the red state, blue state divide.

Geographically, more of America voted for George W. Bush then for Al Gore, as the Electoral College map shows. This would not change even if Gore had been declared the winner in Florida.

Electoral votes are awarded on the basis of population, not area. In would be a meaningless statistic -- except for the punditocracy's adoption of "The Red States" as a shorthand reference to the culture and politics of those won by George W. Bush. It is meant as a pejorative. But why are those states red?

The short answer is television.

The networks use color-coding to show which campaign has won what state. The Republican states generally appear red and the Democrat states appear blue. There may be no deeper meaning here. An examination of the origins of the coding scheme would no doubt show that a network type once decided "R for red, R for Republican" would be a convenient mnemonic. But, as John Morgan, one of America's leading electoral demographers says, they have it backwards.

He says five colors make up the international ideological tableau: red, pink, orange, blue and purple.

Red, as anyone familiar with the Soviet flag should realize, is the communist color. It is symbolic of the blood of the workers shed in the struggle against the capitalist system. In American slang, "red" is a pejorative word meaning a communist.

Pink is the socialist color. Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary says that pink, in it's adjective form, refers to those "holding moderately radical and usually socialistic political or economic views."

During the 2001 French municipal elections, pundits on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean predicted that a "pink wave" was in the offing, ready to propel the Socialists into power across France at the local level.

They weren't, by the way.

The Irish question aside, moderates are typically identified by the color orange.

This may have something to do with the Dutch House of Orange, from which the British restoration monarchs William and Mary came. More likely, it is that orange is, on the spectrum, a moderate color -- neither hot nor cold. As Morgan points out, it falls in between the red and blue extremes.

Blue is the conservative color. On election night in the United Kingdom, Tory candidates wear blue ribbons. In the U.S. Congress, conservative Democrats seeking to set themselves apart from the liberal party leadership formed a coalition they called "The Blue Dogs."

The last color, purple, is the color of the monarchy. Darker then blue, it is a majestic hue, favored, as Morgan points out, by royalty for the ermine-fringed cloaks they wear on formal occasions.

In the larger scheme of things, this is of little importance. However, given the earlier point about the perception and reality of ideological bias in the media, it is fair to wonder if someone is, through the chromatic inversion, trying to tell us something.