You are quite right about those black dots. They’re likewise pretty hard to notice, so another phantom data set going on. Perhaps it’s job gains?

Nevermind, it turns out the black dots are job losses… I just found the relevant video for this section. The blue dots are manufacturing jobs in the 1990s. Then in a video sequence, they turn black to show those jobs going away. This frame is grabbed from early in the “dots turning black” sequence. It’s at ~12m 50s: http://www.pbs.org/america-revealed/episode/4/

I do believe that the first map you point out, the dot map, is actually a chloropleth map with a dot distribution map overlaid upon it. Also, If you look at Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Minnesota and Georgia you will notice some black dots as well, though I’m not quite sure what they represent. It would appear that there is more going on here than first realized.

I don’t know much about the PBS show in which they’ll be used (and therefore may be justly criticized for failing to do my research), but I have the impression, with so many maps, that they’ll be a centerpiece of it. The assortment of visualizations don’t seem to have a theme to them entirely. Some are about wind power, others wireless networks, corpse flights, farming, etc. The only thing that ties them together is that they look great on these maps. My suspicion is that they said, “let’s see what we can make awesome maps of” and then built a story around it. I could be wrong, though.

These people put so much effort into the maps’ appearance and they know its going out to a national audience, so they have every incentive to get it right. It seems lazy.

One quibble with your analysis: I don’t think ‘infotainment’ is the problem here (though oh man, secret corpse flights!) Better maps (assuming still very pretty) wouldn’t negatively impact the entertainment value of the special, so there’s no reason to do mess these up on purpose. I don’t think they’d even have to add more explanation, they could say what the content of the maps are in exactly the same words and it would be just as intelligible.

These maps, I suspect, were designed to be moving, flashing, and more or less fleeting on a television screen. They’re simple eye candy to accompany narration, never really allowing us a chance to try to make interpretations—or misinterpretations—anyway. They don’t work well as stills, but probably serve their purpose in video. I’m okay with making “bad” eye candy maps sometimes after careful consideration of what’s being sacrificed. Maybe the cartographers here did give it careful thought—for the video medium. But this is 2012 and there’s a whole internet out there; you can’t design for such a narrow use and get away with it! The stills are splashed all over the place as promotions, and we can all play, pause, and repeat the video clips a million times on YouTube. I guess there’s a lesson in there somewhere: don’t think only about how your maps are meant to be used, but also how they will be used. (Not that they even cared here, probably.)