By TRACIE MORALES
The UNITY News Online

The brutal rape and beating of a Central Park jogger in 1989 drew national headlines, but the sexual assault and murder of a young black woman in New York that year barely got a mention, journalist Rubén Rosario said Wednesday at a panel session.

Rosario, of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, said he saw the unfair coverage of certain crime stories firsthand while he was a reporter for the New York Daily News.

Today’s police reporters are expected to find impossible details, chase trends and crime statistics, but dwindling resources and other obstacles complicate fair crime coverage, the panelists said.

“When you get handed a lemon, make lemonade,” Rosario said to about 50 journalists with varying levels of experience.

Along with Rosario, panel speakers included Lori Dorfman, executive director of the Berkeley Media Studies Group; Alden Loury, editor and publisher of The Chicago Reporter; and moderator Ted Guest, president of the Criminal Justice Journalists in Washington, D.C.

Learning how to deal with editors, police departments and public information officers is necessary to paint an accurate picture of crime as it relates to communities of color, according to Loury and Rosario.

“Gain sources that you can get to if you have a question,” Loury said. “You need to have a brain that you can pick for feedback on how to cover a particular story.”

Panelists said more in-depth reporting and telling humanizing stories might further people’s understanding of certain groups such as drug dealers, gang members and undocumented immigrants.

Rosario said the recent story of an undocumented Guatemalan woman required more reporting after national headlines demonized the 24-year-old. Olga Franco was in a vehicle that slammed into a school bus on Feb. 19, killing four children.

Journalists from the Pioneer Press returned to Franco’s village in Guatemala and reported that she moved to the United States to help support her family.

“She wasn’t just a monster from a foreign country who slammed her car into a bus and killed four white kids,” Rosario said. “We humanized her.”

Franco, who was charged with manslaughter, is awaiting trial.

The panelists said other forms of in-depth reporting include knowing about police department protocols, wrongful death suits involving officers, traffic stop data and clearance records for past cases.