balanced reporting on gaza?

The current war in Gaza raises a couple of tricky questions about "balanced" or "objective" coverage. It has been noted by many observers that the war is being reported differently by the media in different countries. And whereas some certainly have a pro-Palestinian bias, The Independent's Middle East expert Robert Fisk has accused almost the whole Western media of ignoring the real story - which, he argues, is "the dispossession of the Palestinian people". In an article on aljazeera.net, media analyst Habib Battah observes that the US mainstream media are "prioritising Israel's version of events while underplaying the views of Palestinian groups". He points out, for example, that US media tend to give equal coverage to Palestinian and Israeli victims although the Palestinian casualties outnumber the Israeli one by a hundred fold:

However, such comparisons were rare because the scripts read by American correspondents often excluded the overall Palestinian death count. By stripping the context, American viewers may have easily assumed a level playing field, rather than a case of disproportionate force... When number of deaths did appear - sometimes as a graphic at the bottom of the screen - it was identified as the number of "people killed" rather than being attributed specifically to Palestinians. No wonder the overwhelmingly asymmetrical bombardment of Gaza has been framed vaguely as "rising tensions in the Middle East" by news anchors.

The coverage appears "balanced" in a certain sense by giving equal coverage to victims on both sides of the conflict - but is it really balanced? Battah poses some simple questions:

If an Israeli woman had lost five daughters in a Palestinian attack, would The Washington Post run an equally sized photograph of a relatively unharmed Palestinian woman, who was merely distraught over Israeli missile fire?...would the paper have ever considered balancing a story about a massive attack on Israelis with an in-depth lead piece on the strategy of Palestinian militants?

Battah exempts CNN International from his criticism, and it might be mentioned that The Washington Post did run an article by former US President Jimmy Carter which was highly critical of Israel's war - but this doesn't invalidate the main points he is raising, nor the criticism by Robert Fisk. Does this mean, then, that one should give up the ideal of being "balanced"? Or rather be more careful about its meaning?
Another important issue related to balanced reporting is the ban on journalists who want to enter Gaza for coverage. As the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel has argued in a very interesting article, this is to some extent counterproductive, as it leaves Palestinian journalists with a monopoly on reporting from Gaza and influencing world opinion. But apparently, the reasoning in Israel was that it would be easy to dismiss such reports by Arabs as "biased", whereas critical coverage by media organizations with a reputation of being "balanced" would be difficult to handle. Which seems to indicate once again that being balanced is important...