Two guests in Season 1 examined Libya's media landscape from different angles — Abdulaziz Lamlum (EP 8) through Gaddafi-era propaganda, and Emad Badi (EP 4) through post-2011 media manipulation.
Lamlum, who was 16 during the revolution, described watching Libyan state TV and thinking the production quality was laughably bad — star dissolves, peaked audio, an aesthetic frozen in the 1980s. He mocked it to his mother. Later, when rebels raided Gaddafi's TV stations, they found state-of-the-art equipment. The bad production was intentional: a deliberate attempt to freeze Libya culturally, aesthetically, and politically. Lamlum wrote his university dissertation on this realisation. "The joke was on me."
He connected this to the Kuleshov effect in editing — how the same neutral image, juxtaposed with different contexts, produces entirely different meanings. Propaganda, he argued, works on the same principle.
Osama Alfitory (EP 10) described a related phenomenon: Gaddafi kept Libyans ignorant of their own geography, tribal diversity, and political vocabulary. "We didn't even know what 'constitution' meant in Arabic." The media was one tool among many for maintaining this ignorance.
Emad Badi described how media became weaponised after the revolution. He co-wrote a nuanced analysis of the conflict that blamed both sides. Libyan media outlets — operated by foreign-backed actors — partially translated the piece, removing the parts that challenged "their" side, making it appear he endorsed one faction. His work was stripped of nuance and turned into a recruitment tool.
Ghazi Gheblawi (EP 5) addressed the writer's version of this problem: Ahmed al-Bukhari, a Libyan writer who spoke freely, was targeted by militias after 2011 and forced into exile. The cost of free expression in post-revolutionary Libya is not abstract.