Walking the Beat

Coverage of the crash of Flight 587 shows the importance of consistent community coverage

Coverage: Links to Daily News articles Many Fliers Were Off To Homeland Reunions Families Recall Hopes And Dreams of Victims 6 Joined by Fate

No one was certain yet whether terrorists were responsible for the Nov. 12 crash, two months and a day after the Twin Towers were felled with passenger planes. But it was abundantly clear that none of the 260 people on board Flight 587 had survived and that the overwhelming majority of them were of Dominican origin. Yet, my callers complained, the television news segments they saw focused almost exclusively on the trauma suffered by those in Belle Harbor, many of them families of firefighters whose ranks had been decimated in the World Trade Center collapses.

Were Spanish-speaking victims less worthy of coverage — they asked — and would the print media also reflect such a bias?

My reporter's protective callus has not grown back since it sloughed off after the Sept. 11 attacks, and because I am Dominican, I identified quite closely with the passengers on the plane. My tears made it hard to be clear-eyed about the facts. Were the victims on Flight 587 under-covered, or did it just seem that way?

I watched newscasts with a stopwatch and read newspapers with a ruler. Even during the first day, stories focused on the crash site were roughly equal in length to those focused on victims. But for the first two days, stories originating from Queens almost invariably received higher billing in the English-language press. That decision made logical news sense. The crash was the primordial piece of news. And the fact that Belle Harbor was home to the same civil servants who had become emblematic figures of the World Trade Center attacks made for an unavoidable hook.

But that angle, though compelling, was not the entire story.

Those familiar with New York's ethnic geography know that Dominicans are heavily concentrated in Washington Heights in Manhattan, Corona in Queens and Williamsburg in Brooklyn, and that the crash would cut a wide swath of mourning in those neighborhoods. Newsrooms with Latino staffers who have worked in those areas and know their formal and informal institutions were able to react quickly and ask to be dispatched to where they would most easily find victims' families. One non-Latino ran into families and friends of those on the flight simply by stepping outside his Washington Heights apartment. A CNN producer declared the scene at Alianza Dominicana, a large social service organization in the same neighborhood, "a quorum meeting of our local NAHJ group."

Many of the local news media outlets sent reporters to Dominican neighborhoods ­- and even to the Dominican Republic — from newsrooms depleted by the demands of wartime coverage. But the coverage they produced ended up being placed after the first commercial break or past several pages of ads. And that left many viewers and readers with the impression that there was a disproportionate emphasis placed on those affected on the ground — where five died — over those affected by the deaths of 260 on the plane. That first-day impression was hard to budge, despite dozens of clips proving otherwise.

Breaking news, and especially disaster stories, require lightning-fast judgment calls. But we sometimes forget that those decisions are made based on the mental map we have of the communities we cover regularly. Drawing that map long before disaster hits is the only thing that can help us get it right the first time.