Frontline Headlines

On a chilly early March evening in  Benghazi, staff at the recently formed newspaper Libya worked furiously under the dim light of two dangling bulbs. Notebooks, hard drives, empty water bottles and tangled cords covered the news desk as writers’ faces glowed blue from the light of their laptop screens, their eyes tired from long days of hard grind. Operating out of a former state security building on the Mediterranean waterfront, the newsroom walls were covered in colored caricatures criticizing Libyan leader Colonel Muammar al-Qadhafi. One poster showed him as half of a two-headed dragon and another with Michael Jackson’s nose. Like other writers, journalists and activists that have mobilized in the midst of Libya’s uprising, the volunteer team has embraced newfound media freedoms after nearly 42 years of repression.  For the first time in more than four decades, radio broadcasts relate accounts of events across the country uncensored by