“A disturbing snapshot of an angry America. evil.” That’s how the obscure news website Inter Reviewed describes us.
Huh? Who, us?
Famous newsman Ted Koppel’s ballyhooed visit last June to Granite City in search of Mayberry reverberates still. Of late, it’s taken a nasty turn.
The Washington Post newspaper is trying to kick up a storm with a year-end review last week of the controversial CBS TV news report “Mayberry Comes To Life,” complete with reflections now from Koppel, inspiration and longtime anchor of the old, groundbreaking Nightline late-night TV news program.
“People either loved it or hated it,” Koppel told the Post of his report on Mount Airy.
The Post did not go so far as to call us here in the hometown area evil. The newspaper merely called us “an unsettling snapshot.” So what’s so “unsettling” about us?
Let’s go back to the CBS TV program “Sunday Morning.” Its 13-minute news report that aired Sept. 19 began innocuously enough. “The good old days?” gushed program host Jane Pauley about “The Andy Griffith Show,” widely viewed as a reflection of Griffith’s hometown of Mount Airy. “When life was simpler, more neighborly, civilized,” Pauley said.
Next, Koppel strolled South Main Street with the chamber president, across from the Mayberry Courthouse and Jail and Wally’s Service Station tourist sites where the Mayberry squad-car tours are based. The two explained the economics of promoting Mount Airy tourism by drawing on the Mayberry mystique. Koppel chuckled at sounding the siren in a replica squad car.
Then Griffith show actress Betty Lynn, before she died in October, was shown signing autographs for Andy Griffith Museum visitors. At Mayberry Courthouse an adoring little boy from Ohio watches the show four hours a day, his mother gushed for Koppel. Snappy Lunch patrons from Louisiana said they came all this way for a pork chop sandwich.
So far so good. The story had the elements of what the Post called “a seeming puff piece,” newspaper lingo for a feel-good, happy story, a counter to all of the gloom and doom that so often comes from newspapers.
But at 4:35 into the report things began to swing raw. Politics, as Koppel would call it, began to suck the air out of the puff piece.
“A godless society” today stands in stark contrast to the higher moral values displayed in the 1960s Griffith show, an unnamed patron in line at Snappy Lunch told Koppel.
The TV show then took off on that theme.
Next, an African American family described segregation times. They had to take their restaurant food (restaurant unnamed) outside, they told Koppel. “Blacks knew where they belonged,” one told Koppel.
A U.S. flag with a picture of Donald Trump and the caption “Making America Great Again!” was shown waving in the wind.
The climax came on a trolley car tour. Not shown are the highlights of Mount Airy, the pleasant neighborhoods, the energized schools, the fine hospital or the industrious workers. Koppel asked riders – including a Barney Fife impersonator along with one-time Surry County commissioner Gary York – riders who were interested in seeing the town, about the 2020 election and the storming of the U.S. Capitol a year ago instead.
“I know you came here to have a good time,” Koppel told the group from the front of the rolling trolley, TV camera with red light by his side, “and not to talk politics.” Koppel then proceeded to talk politics.
The response? Unsettling? Disturbing? Angry? Evil? You may see for yourself at https://rayscountryham.com/mayberry on the internet.
Don’t have the time for that? OK, let me answer: Not one bit. The people in Mount Airy spoke frankly, calmly, politely and honestly about the politics when asked.
“We don’t even watch the news on TV anymore,” one unnamed rider ironically told Koppel. “We don’t feel like that we are being told the truth. … We’re trying to be swayed in a direction that we know is not the right direction.”
In the most touching moment in the report, another rider told Koppel: “I just hope when this airs, it won’t show Southerners as a bunch of dumb idiots. … We have a lot of love in our hearts. We love our country. We love our fellow man.”
Koppel told the Post “that truly never was the intent.”
But some are making his report into just that. Listed as the No. 1 most-read article on the Washington Post website, the story carried a Post online headline: “They believe in Mayberry but suggest Jan. 6 was staged.”
Koppel denied to the Post that his report was a “hit job” on Mount Airy. But he conceded that “some residents in Mount Airy and viewers in Southern states took issue.”
What did all of that have to do with a TV retrospective of the Griffith show? Nothing. But then the CBS report never really was about the Griffith show, Mayberry or Mount Airy. That’s what should be so unsettling and disturbing.
Stephen Harris returned home to live in State Road. For more information on Stephen, visit https://www.facebook.com/AllRoadsShouldLeadToStateRoad?ref=hl
Source: https://www.mtairynews.com
Be First to Comment