Sometimes a Storyline is a Goliath

As part of our show On David and Goliath, we emailed about twenty bloggers we read regularly to ask for a David and Goliath story. From Ethan Zuckerman of my heart’s in accra and Global Voices, we got something we didn’t expect:

You want David and Goliath? David is any advocate concerned about any issue outside the Middle East: the elections in the DRC, the ongoing conflict in northern Uganda, the struggle to tackle AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. The Goliath isn’t the Middle East – it’s the tendency of the global media to treat news from the Middle East as more important than news from anywhere else in the world. Much more ranting here.

Ethan Zuckerman, in an email to Open Source, July 25, 2006

So how about it? Is Open Source, in shifting its focus to the Middle East these last two weeks, sacrificing the important for the urgent? If not Israel, Lebanon and Hezbollah, what should we be covering? What are the important stories?