And this was not in the original coverage … why?
A generous excuse would be that some local news covered it and it got picked up nationally without any editing. A less generous explanation would be that supposedly national or international reporters just assume that they live at the center of the Universe and it’s up to everyone else to know where 42nd Street [1] is.
I can halfway forgive news aggregators like Google for repeating stories about fires or building collapses from TV stations and only identify the source as e.g. KTVK – which anyone outside of their broadcast coverage might figure out was somewhere west of the Mississippi [2] but that’s about it. Particularly annoying are regional weather warnings that don’t identify the region.
In this case, Suffolk being a common names for counties (Ohio has 88; Texas has 254.) If you (or anyone else) saw a news item from the hypothetical Suffolk County (TX, population 192) and innocently assumed NY you might be a bit annoyed too.
[1] In Phoenix it’s a 2-lane N/S street through residential neighborhoods 5.25 miles east of city center.
[2] Phoenix. Where I haven’t lived for seven years now, but since then in much smaller towns.
