Reporting the Middle East

Greetings, my pretties.

I've been away for a couple of weeks on the sunnier side of the Atlantic, and while I've actually been back in London since the 30th, getting back into the swing of things at work has proved time-consuming.

Anyway.

It now seems that one of the most troubling bouts of violence in a while has hit the Middle East, and is not only destroying the lives of many innocent people in both Lebanon and Israel, but also has the potential to destabilise the region as a whole.

Now, there are many excellent news forums and discussion websites for you to talk about what's happening in the Middle East and whether it's the right course of action to take. But for the purposes of this blog, which is ostensibly media-focused, I'm more interested in putting the following question to you:

Where can you go to read balanced, fair coverage of the Middle East crisis that does not

• focus on one side's suffering while whitewashing over the other's?
• choose to ignore the root causes or historical justifications for actions?
• ignore the wider political and social context in which these actions are made?

I welcome suggestions of actual websites, newspapers and television programmes. Like most people, I have been closely following coverage of the events of the past few weeks, but it seems that virtually every TV news report, "expert analysis" newspaper article or blog entry that I read is biased toward one side or the other. Should this be accepted as human nature, "just the way it is?" Do newspapers always need to take sides, or shoud they stick to reporting the facts - all the facts.