HERALD'S COVERAGE

BY FRED TASKER AND FABIOLA SANTIAGO

For reporters, photographers and editors at The Herald, the spring of 1980 was the most thrilling, baffling, adrenaline-pumping time in their careers.

''Miami was the center of the universe,'' says Kevin Hall, then a special projects editor who led Herald coverage of the Mariel boatlift, today a journalism professor at Florida International University.

INTERACTIVE

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It was an orgy of news: 125,000 refugees from Cuba pouring into Florida from the Cuban port of Mariel; Dade School Board Superintendent Johnny Jones convicted of using school money to buy gold-plated plumbing for his vacation home; four white Miami-Dade police officers acquitted by an all-white Tampa jury in the beating death of black motorcyclist Arthur McDuffie; the ensuing Miami riots.

The tumultuous events demonstrated the strengths and weaknesses of The Herald. Many praised the coverage. But two academics later accused The Herald of ''spinning'' its stories and editorials to discredit the boatlift and the refugees -- a charge denied by Herald editors.

They were dangerous days. Herald photographer Tim Chapman hired a Cessna 172 and pilot to get photos of power boats from Miami speeding across the Florida Straits toward Cuba to rescue relatives. Straying into Cuban air space, the plane was nearly blasted out of the sky when two Cuban MiGs flew within 50 feet and turned on their afterburners.

''We were caught in the vortex,'' Chapman says. ``It almost turned the plane upside down.''

Herald reporter Janet Fix, 24, just two years out of journalism school at the University of Nebraska, hitched a ride from Key West on a Mariel-bound boat. She spent a week in the harbor there, hiding under a tarp from Cuban and Russian guards who threatened jail time for undocumented reporters, whispering stories back to The Herald's City Desk on the ship's radio.

''My parents were so upset when they heard what I'd done,'' she says.

Earni Young, usually a consumer writer, found herself, a black woman, covering the McDuffie riots. She witnessed a gruesome scene in which two white motorists were pulled from their cars on Northwest 62nd Street and beaten to death; she saw one of them run over repeatedly by a car. Her cover blown when her companion dropped a two-way radio, Young had to run for her life.

They were heady days. Hall says with a laugh: ``The White House would call every day and ask what was going on. Then an hour later, they would put out a statement saying what we'd said. How was I supposed to put that in the paper?''

Hall remembers that The Herald used 51 reporters on three continents, in six countries and in 13 states to cover Mariel and the riots. One major problem: Of those 51 reporters, only seven or eight spoke Spanish. Two of them worked for El Herald, the newspaper's Spanish-language edition; two others were unseasoned rookies. In a county that had gone from 5.4 percent Hispanic in 1960 to 37.5 percent in 1980, it was The Herald's biggest weakness.

TEEMING KEY WEST

It showed. One day when Key West was teeming with arriving refugees, a non-Spanish-speaking Herald reporter wrote a story about the economic boom it was creating for that city. It was all about the refugees, but it didn't quote one of them.

The headlong events forced The Herald and El Herald to cooperate on coverage -- something they had not done to that extent since El Herald was founded in 1976.

''Back then,'' says Roberto Fabricio, El Herald's editor at the time, ``El Herald was in what they called la pecera -- the fish tank -- enclosed by walls that separated it from The Herald's city desk.''

The cooperation helped. Guillermo Martinez had just been brought from El Herald to The Herald and became the lead reporter covering Mariel -- reporting from Miami, Key West and San Jose, Costa Rica, when refugees were sent there.

''We were spread too thin,'' Martinez says. ``But

we had a lot of fun.''

On one story, Ileana Oroza, then an El Herald reporter, now a journalism professor at the University of Miami, was teamed up with Mike Winerip, a senior feature writer for The Herald.

''I was upset I was being just a translator,'' she says now, ``but then his story was wonderful and I was glad I could help good people. We really did team up.''

A MISS

But the newspaper's dearth of Spanish-speaking reporters made it miss at least one major story.

When Cuban officials secretly communicated to a Miami Cuban that Fidel Castro would permit Miami Cubans to come to Mariel by boat and pick up their relatives, it was the talk of Cuban radio for a day or two before The Herald picked up the story, alerted by hundreds of boats leaving local docks, Martinez says.

Another charge against The Herald came in a 1993 book, City on the Edge: The Transformation of Miami, by sociologists Alex Stepick of Florida International University and Alejandro Portes of Johns Hopkins University. They wrote: 'Through editorials, letters to the editor and the `spin' it put on news stories, The Herald sought initially to prevent the new wave of Cuban immigration from taking place, and, when that failed, to discredit the fresh arrivals.''

`OVERWHELMED'

The book cites work by researcher Yohel Camayd-Freixas, who counted the number of ''negative'' and ''positive'' Herald stories. He said ''negative'' stories topped out at 90 percent at the peak of the boatlift and averaged 40 percent to 60 percent thereafter.

Says Hall: ``We were overwhelmed. We were doing eight stories a day. There was no time to spin. There wasn't even time for real reflection.''

Says Fabricio: ``Every paper has to reflect its community's reality. The Herald reflected its world and El Herald reflected the joy Cubans felt to leave Cuba. The common concern was about the undesirables. Many Cubans at this point started worrying that our city was being transformed.''

''With more time,'' says Hall, ``we might have had less but better focused coverage. There was no time to sort through it all.

"We were snatching every fly out of the air.''
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Fred Tasker and Fabiola Santiago were reporters involved in The Herald's coverage of Mariel.