They should be equally balanced. Calibrate the monitor with a calibrator and don't touch the internal workings of the monitor and the video card.
While I would use a calibration puck and profiling software, depending upon what you have you
do want to touch the monitor's settings. If you have a CRT or a monitor with a high bit monitor LUT then you'll get better results from tweaking the white point manually. On a CRT contrast is actually luminance (or brightness by the commonly accepted definition) and brightness controls the black level. These settings must be set manually on a CRT or you'll get a terrible profile out of it.
Now, if you have a TFT and not a CRT, and it does not have a high resolution monitor LUT then you will want to leave those settings alone. You will have to adjust the luminance (brightness... in the case of TFTs, brightness actually does what it says it does) based upon feedback from your profiling software.
Either way you
must have profiling hardware and software to get the job done. It can not be done by eye, and it can not be done with some preset values. Even if someone who has the same monitor tells you what their settings are, those settings will not be correct for your monitor.
Cheers, Joe