52. Name: Asim Ali Al-Jaradat Title: Handling Political Conflicts in Documentary Films: Al Jazeera Channel’s ‘Top Secret’ Series as a Case Study Institution: Middle East University Country: Jordon Date: 2009 Language: Arabic Abstract: This research examines documentary films to understand how they deal with political conflicts. It seeks to unpack the wonders this type of TV production try to raise and how close its treatment is to the reality. This study focuses on Al Jazeera’s “Top Secret” series, which examine various political conflicts. The researcher selected a sample of four episodes out of the entire series consisting of 34 episodes. Using content analysis, the study found that there was a clear bias in the examined episodes towards one party against another, which affects the balance of the documentary. This bias can be noticed the Palestinian-Israeli conflict episode, in which the Palestinian political figures appeared 28 times, while the Israeli political figures did not appear at all. Similarly, in the US-Al Qaida episode, the documentary did not show any political figure from Al-Qaida, while the American political figures appeared four times. The findings also revealed that the total narration time was too long. It took 49.41 minutes in the four episodes out of 158.16 minutes, which means that the documentary maker gave so much time to self-opinion.
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