From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield.

On Friday, the government of Omar Gaddafi announced a ceasefire,

a day after a UN Security Council resolution called for a no-fly zone

and military intervention to protect Libyan civilians.

Whether this will open up the country is not clear.

Throughout the month-long Libyan uprising, Gaddafi has shown no tolerance for journalism.

Last week, Libyan authorities detained and beat reporters from BBC Arabic and subjected them to mock executions.

A few days after their release, Al Jazeera cameraman Ali Hassan

Al-Jabbar was killed in an apparent ambush. Speaking on State Radio Thursday, Gaddafi called on

Libyans to attack press vehicles and destroy broadcast stations. Yet, Libya's government announced

Friday that it would be releasing

four New York Times reporters who disappeared earlier this week. In the chaos, some major

news organizations are pulling the reporters out of Libya, which could lead to a near-total

information vacuum. Ben Wiedeman is CNN's senior international correspondent and the first American journalist to enter Libya when the protests began in February.

He and his crew have been leery of the government from the start.

We entered the country technically illegally without visas, and the government made it very clear from the beginning that we would be considered outlaws

and, in fact, cooperating with al-Qaeda.

Otherwise, certainly the threat of bombing by jets of the Libyan Air Force was ever present

whenever you were very close to the front.

It was fairly chaotic in the sense that this was not,

at least on the rebel side, a rational, organized military force.

...