On the scale of unmitigated public relations disasters, call it a Category 5. That's what can happen when your city is beset by the national media buzzards who won't fly off until they've picked clean every stereotype, every prejudice, every grievance they can find.

Sadly, that's been the recent fate of our proud North Carolina city of Durham, just 20 minutes northwest of my office in Raleigh along our little stretch of cross-country Interstate 40. Caught in the same 24-hour news maelstrom has been equally proud Duke University, whose men's lacrosse team lacked the good sense not to throw a boozy party featuring a pair of dancers hired from an escort service. No party, no rape complaint, no team members arrested, no media hullabaloo.

Certainly the story has been propelled by the stark violence of the alleged crime set against the players' protestations of innocence. But it has gained massive traction on the strength of an all-too-convenient formula -- rich, privileged students exploiting, to one degree or another, women from the poor side of town who must have been desperate to have been working as exotic dancers in the first place.

That formula then conjured up the image of elite and costly Duke yoked in awkward tandem with blue-collar, hard-scrabble Durham. The whole episode has had as well a racial dimension, with the two players charged so far both white and the woman who is their accuser an African-American who attends the city's other university, historically black N.C. Central.

No news story displaying so many elements of a not terribly original television movie script come to life ever has been in danger of being underplayed or ignored.

But which of those elements distort reality as understood by those of us who aren't just parachuting in to get some film for the next cable newscast? Duke, even if much of its splendid campus sits apart from its host city's core, can hardly stand convicted of existing in its own upper-crust isolation bubble. While efforts could and no doubt will be intensified, it has an active community outreach program meant to help its civic neighbors and itself in the process.

As for Durham, North Carolina's fourth largest city with right around 200,000 residents, its image has been reduced to a simplistic and unflattering caricature.

Durham long has offered a classic example of how no good deed goes unpunished by the jealous or the uninformed. The city does struggle with poverty and the crime and misery that go with it. But to suggest that poverty, or crime, is the city's defining feature is grossly off the mark. It is an intellectually lazy, if not racist, conclusion influenced by the fact that Durham's population has a higher than average quotient of African-Americans -- 43.8 percent as determined by the 2000 census.

For more than a century, among Durham's key distinguishing features has been its vibrant black community -- a community that supported its own thriving businesses and cultural institutions. It was hardly a coincidence that N.C. Central University arose there.

A freeway built in the 1960s ripped through what was once the black business center, known as Hayti. Poverty went on to grip some nearby sections of town. But at the same time, a black middle class solidified as the city expanded.

Durham's economic driver for much of the 20th century was tobacco. That industry's decline has meant the loss of many good jobs.

But tobacco money is the cornerstone of Duke, whose presence makes Durham a global intellectual magnet. Obsolete cigarette factories in the city's downtown meanwhile are being reborn as stunningly attractive collections of offices, shops and apartments. There is a pleasing cultural buzz in the center of Durham that seems to grow louder by the month.

The stereotype of Durham as some kind of Tar Heel basket case explodes most dramatically in famed Research Triangle Park, most of which lies within the city's boundaries. And the aforementioned I-40, which runs through Durham for several miles, actually goes nowhere near downtown. It traverses a booming prosperity corridor that features one of North Carolina's fanciest malls. Thanks to the state's progressive annexation rules, the city now encompasses a little over 100 square miles.

Is there a polarized tension between Duke and its host city? Oh, it's easy enough to detect some strains.

But Durham is far too multidimensional to be typecast as bringing nothing to the relationship except resentment. However the pending rape charges are resolved, the case and those caught up in it should be treated and judged as individuals, not as figures in some rich-vs.-poor, white-vs.-black or gown-vs.-town morality play with predetermined plot and motives.

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