When violence escalates in the Middle East, so does reader rhetoric about newspapers' coverage of the news. The public editor's inbox of late has attracted invective from both ends of the spectrum -- those who think The N&O is biased in favor of Israel and those who see a slant toward the Arabs.

"I am in close touch with people who live and work in Israel and Palestine, and I can assure you that the coverage about the conflict in this region is so one-sided and incomplete that it would be funny if it wasn't so disastrous to those who are trying to live and work there," wrote Tema Okun of Durham, who says The N&O coverage doesn't reflect the suffering of Palestinians under Israeli occupation.

On the other hand, Susan Behrends of Raleigh wrote back in June: "from reading all these articles...one would naturally think the Israelis are overreacting."

Reader interest has spiked in the last month with the escalation of hostilities ignited by the capture of an Israeli soldier by the military wing of Hamas, which governs the Palestinian Authority. With the seizure of two more Israelis last week by the Lebanese-based Hezbollah, a full-fledged Middle Eastern war is possibly in prospect.

Coverage of the Middle East is a no-win thicket for newspapers, because they never can satisfy the strong passions of partisans on both sides. People tend not to have a neutral position on the unhappy, never-ending Arab-Israeli hostilities, and a paper that tries to steer a middle passage will upset those along either shore. "People in favor of one side read the left-hand pages of the book. People on the other side read the right-hand pages," says Duke University public policy professor Bruce Jentleson.

Jentleson was a policy planner in President Clinton's State Department and a key foreign policy adviser to Al Gore in the 2000 election. The measure of good coverage, he suggests, is to look not at individual articles, but at the body of a newspaper's work over time.

So I did that, beginning with the June 25 kidnapping of the Israeli soldier. As of Friday, The N&O had published about two dozen stories on the conflict ("about," because some are sidebars or info boxes). Four stories appeared on the front page, four on the main Nation/World page 3A, the rest inside.

The stories mainly have been a moving picture of the unfolding conflict on a day-by-day basis, keyed to the latest news developments. Almost every article is accompanied by a brief box supplying related developments or background information. There were a couple of analysis pieces, including one last Sunday on why the Palestinians keep up their near-daily shelling of Israel with mostly ineffective rockets (Answer: they create a climate of fear). On Friday, the paper produced a comprehensive front-page report on the Israel-Hezbollah confrontation that included a full page of stories inside.

All in all, I'd say, this is a stream of stories that serve the purpose of informing and are, taken together, balanced. If anything, they've shed more light from the Palestinian perspective than the Israeli -- two stories focused on what international aid officials are calling a humanitarian crisis in Gaza created by Israeli military pressure

Two complaints about Arab-Israeli coverage recur. One, that the paper's news services use loaded language -- "militant," "terrorist" -- in reporting that should be descriptive. The other is that there is not enough context -- depth, background, explanation -- to the daily chronicling of events.

Regarding language usage, it's a complaint that the paper needs to be sensitive to. Newspapers justify words such as "militant" or "terrorist" to describe Arab forces because such international organizations as the United Nations and European Union have labeled Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations. "I think calling Hamas 'terrorist' is pretty consistent with existing definitions of terrorism," Jentleson said. He added, "And I think there's plenty of room to criticize what the Israeli government has been doing."

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