'Mahato, Carson cases marked by uneven responses," read the headline in the Duke student newspaper last week. "Race, sex may affect news."

The stories in the Duke Chronicle struck a nerve with students in a class that I teach at Duke. Why, they wondered, was there such a disparity in the coverage of the murders of Duke graduate student Abhijit Mahato and UNC-CH student body president Eve Carson?

The Carson case was shocking. The story received front-page headlines in the Triangle and national coverage on network and cable television. In The N&O, her name comes up in 88 stories, editorials and letters to the editor published this month.

By contrast, after Mahato was found slain Jan. 18, the first mention of him was in a story on Page 2B on Jan. 20 about two slayings in Durham on the same night. His name has appeared 41 times in The N&O since January. Most of those stories came this month, after it was reported that the same person, Laurence Alvin Lovette Jr., had been charged in both killings.

There are obvious parallels in the cases. Mahato and Carson both were college students, both were victims of apparently random violence and now both are tied to the same suspect. But the coverage was very different.

The students themselves last week pointed to differences in the cases that explained, if not justified, the varying news coverage.

* Carson was the student body president, Mahato a grad student relatively unknown outside his circle of acquaintances and fellow graduate students in the engineering school.

* UNC-CH, with 28,000 students, is a much bigger campus community than Duke, with 13,000, so a student's death has wider reverberations.

* Mahato was an international student, from India, a lower-profile population in the community.

* Carson's murder, as the second campus killing, made it a bigger news story.

* Carson was a young, attractive white female, and the suspect is a black male, which gives the story race and gender dimensions not present with the Mahato case. Some of the students last week saw the media as embracing a Southern miscegenation narrative playing to unhealthy stereotypes.

"We as a society would like to say that nobody's tragedy is more tragic than another's, but the amount of media coverage devoted to a particular case versus another says otherwise," said a comment posted on the Chronicle Web site by a Duke alumnus. "This is very telling as far as the value we place on certain groups of people in this country, and that may be the biggest tragedy of all."

Linda Williams, The N&O's senior editor responsible for local news coverage, has noted that similar questions were raised about the discrepancy in the coverage of Carson and Denita Smith, a 25-year-old black graduate student at N.C. Central University who was killed in January 2007. Smith's killing did not receive as much coverage, especially in the early going.

"One important reason is that the Durham police took more than 24 hours after the woman's body was found to acknowledge that the death was a homicide," Williams wrote in a blog on the N&O Web site, www.newsobserver.com. "The initial reports from police were perplexing. After confirming the homicide, police were still tight-lipped for a very long time about what happened."

Williams said that as more information came out, the Smith story did move to the front page. "The lesson here is that we do not diminish our reporting and presentation when someone like Carson is killed, but that we work harder to get equitable treatment when people are involved from communities that have traditionally not been as forthcoming and as trusting of the press," she wrote.

An N&O reader noticed that in a recent story about Lovette, the suspect in both the Carson and Mahato deaths, the newspaper never referred to Mahato. "Is it because Mahato is dark-skinned and from India? I'll give the writers of the article the benefit of the doubt and say that the racial and ethnic overtones were unintended, but it's time for us to be more sensitive and more attuned to matters of race and ethnicity," wrote Louise Lockwood-Zorowski, of Cary.

I agree with the reader that the disparities in coverage are unintended. Other factors in the coverage -- prominence of the individual, details of the crime, availability of information from police and other authorities -- do genuinely account for differences in coverage. I wouldn't have lessened the coverage of Carson's death. But I do worry that we in the media are slow to recognize the same elements of waste and tragedy when the narrative is not so clear-cut.