The AP report about the shooting in Mount Airy found a cheap, easy theme and could not let go.
Mount Airy, as most North Carolinians know, was the model for the fictional town of Mayberry in “The Andy Griffith Show,” a 1960s sitcom that is still popular in syndication. The town plays up the connection for its tourism draw.
For a 16-paragraph story about an ex-con charged in four fatal shootings that police say could be a contract killing or the result of a love affair, the version of the story on the Charlotte Observer’s Web site refers to the TV show in the lede, in the third paragraph and again in the fifth paragraph.
The shooting victims are ID’d as Victor Alfonso Martinez-Jimenez, 22; Javier Manuel Martinez, 21; Juan Manuel Martinez, 26; and Marcos Oviedo Aguliar, 21. The suspect is Marcos Chavez Gonzalez, 29. You think these guys were big fans of the show?
Perhaps a copy editor, if there weren’t too few of them still employed, could have pared the reporter’s references down to one in the fifth graph, say, to help readers place what is otherwise a small town in the northwestern corner of the state.
I’m assuming the story ran pretty much as the reporter wrote it; it may have been a line editor who botched it up. For that matter, the copy editor who wrote the headline couldn’t resist a Mayberry reference either. Lame.