There's always a low fever of reader agitation about coverage of Hispanics in the news. It rose to a higher pitch last week following a fatal collision on Interstate 40 near Raleigh involving a Hispanic driver subsequently charged with drunken driving.

The wreck blocked morning rush-hour traffic for hours on Monday. The News & Observer ran a story Tuesday inside the local section that did not mention the driver's ethnicity. The next day, the paper followed with a front-page story that identified the driver as an illegal immigrant and reported that he previously had been deported.

Some readers suggested that The N&O downplayed the accused driver's ethnicity on the first day out of a political agenda to spare Hispanics negative publicity. "It's incomprehensible that a car crash on I-40 that closed the major east-west corridor through the capital city would be relegated to Section B," wrote Bill Hollcraft of Durham. "Take away all the salacious details of illegal immigration, death and hospitalization, and just the crash itself should have been front-page news. In fact, if it had not been an illegal immigrant, it would have been front-page news."

Van Denton, The N&O's metro editor, denies any political agenda. The low-key treatment on the first day, he said, was a matter of responsible journalism. The Highway Patrol on Monday did not give the driver's name or say where he was from, whether he was an illegal immigrant or even whether he spoke English. The patrol did issue a news release Monday saying that the driver was Hispanic and that he had been charged with drunken driving.

The next day, Tuesday, the patrol released the name -- Michael De Latorre -- that the driver had given the arresting trooper. The N&O reported the name Wednesday, along with information from federal immigration officials that his real name was Ricardo Contreras and that he had been twice arrested and deported for trying to enter the country illegally.

That information, along with new details about the victim, moved the story to the front page, Denton said. "We don't want to make a rush to judgment," he said. "We have to verify it and make sure of information. When we had the Highway Patrol [on Monday] saying 'We're not sure of his identity,' that raises a big red flag for a reporter."

WHY DIDN'T THE PAPER INITIALLY IDENTIFY THE DRIVER AS HISPANIC, as the patrol had stated in the news release? Because, Denton said, The N&O does not include race or ethnic origin in stories unless that information is relevant to the story. "Part of the reason for that is to avoid stereotyping people," he said. The N&O would have identified the driver as Hispanic only if he were known to be an illegal immigrant, which the patrol would not say Monday. The first story did say that federal officials were investigating the immigration status of the driver and a passenger.

(In fact, The N&O did initially say in a report on its Web site Monday that the driver was Hispanic . The ethnic information was removed from the site, Denton said, because "it didn't meet our standard for identifying people by race or ethnicity.")

There is broader context to this incident. For one, WRAL-TV was reporting all day Monday on its newscasts and its Web site that the driver was Hispanic, which caused viewers to wonder about The N&O's coverage. Also, the same day The N&O placed the I-40 story inside the paper, it put on the front page a story about a family of five from Raleigh and Charlotte killed in a one-car crash in Virginia. The family members previously lived in Puerto Rico. One reader pointed out to me the contrast in treatment between Hispanics as victims and as perpetrator.

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