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Jeanmarie Condon and her students produced a documentary
on how the Oslo Agreement affected everyday people's lives.
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Jeanmarie Condon, a senior producer at ABC News with 15 years
of experience in broadcast journalism, believes that the role
of television journalists and documentary filmmakers is vital
to society. She explains, they "hold up a mirror to society,
documenting its frustrations, exploring its faults, calling for
justice, clarifying its present and preserving its sense of history."
Armed with this belief, Condon designed a Fulbright project that
focused on helping the Palestinians of the West Bank develop their
skills in broadcast journalism. Since the 1993 Oslo Peace Agreement,
Palestinians have begun to develop their own television network,
an effort still very much in its beginning stages. Condon's activities
furthered the network's development and, thus, will give the Palestinians
a means of expressing and describing the impact of the peace process
from their own perspective.
The 1999-2000 scholar's lecturing and research project involved
teaching students at Birzeit University about a variety of journalistic
skills, including storytelling styles, investigative reporting,
interviewing, editing, directing and documentary filmmaking. In
addition, she taught condensed versions of the course she offered
at Birzeit in the form of seminars and workshops at each of the
other universities in the West Bank and Gaza. Her students were
also directly involved in the research aspect of her project,
the filming of a documentary entitled, "A Year in the West
Bank: Documenting the Peace."
According to Condon, filming documentary allows the journalist
more freedom and, for her, represented a break from the limitations
of producing segments for major U.S. and European news outlets.
With her students, she collaborated to document how the Oslo Peace
Agreement shaped the expectations and hopes of the Palestinians
in autonomous areas. They hoped that the documentary would show,
as accurately as possible, how the peace process has unfolded
and official peace agreements have impacted people's everyday
lives over the past seven years. With the help of her students,
she selected several Palestinians and some Israelis whose lives
they followed throughout the year. The students were instrumental
in the reporting and interviewing process and gained hands-on
experience in the field of documentary filmmaking. Her documentary
project also fulfilled her desire to provide a realistic and intimate
portrayal of life on the West Bank and Gaza and to add to her
own understanding of the situation there. By sharing her skills
with students and conducting workshops with the Palestinian authorities
on the value of broadcast media, Condon left them with the ability
and determination to tell the world their story.
"I hope that, as a journalist and teacher," Condon
said, "I can do the kind of work that will continue to create
some kind of mutual understanding. I do this work above all because
I believe that it is our ability to empathize with one another
that, even in our darkest hours, continues to save us."
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