Nets scramble to cover Gadhafi's death

GaddafiLibyans gather Thursday as news spread of Moammar Gadhafi's death. Moammar Gadhafi: Alive? Wounded? Captured? Killed?Prior to president Obama's Thursday afternoon press conference, news nets scrambled to confirm conflicting reports of the Libyan strongman's fate, and the most extreme case turned out to be the truth: Libyan leaders confirmed that the dictator had been killed, and fledgling net Al Jazeera English was including graphic pictures and videos of the Middle Eastern leader's corpse as part of its coverage from roughly 10:30 a.m. ET.CBS News had footage of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton receiving the message on her BlackBerry. "Wow," Clinton said in the clip. "Unconfirmed reports about Gadhafi being captured. Unconfirmed, yeah. We've had a bunch of those before -- we've had him captured a couple of times."This time, though, it was for real.Libyan Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril told reporters in Tripoli Thursday morning that Libyans "have been waiting for this moment for a long time." Early on Thursday, rebel fighters captured Gadhafi's hometown of Sirte. Early on Thursday, French news agency AFP quoted a commander for the National Transition Council (the rebel force) saying that Gadhafi had been captured in Sirte and "seriously wounded." Evidence of Gadhafi's death was in gruesome abundance on Thursday. CNN aired video provided by Al-Arabiya that appeared to show the former dictator still alive but bleeding from wounds on his head as he was manhandled into a jeep and beaten. Unedited copies of the video were posted all over the Web moments later; someone close to the cameraman or possibly the cameraman himself is shouting, "Allahu Akbar!" ("God is great!") as Gadhafi is passed around among the soldiers. Photos of the body were circulated by several agencies. Gadhafi was 69.The Arab Spring uprisings have caused turmoil across the Middle East, ending in revolutions for Egypt, where president Hosni Mubarak was ousted, and Tunisia. Nations including Syria, Bahrain and Yemen have undergone serious governmental changes, and unrest in other countries in the region threatens to blossom into full-blown civil war.The abundance of international news has put a serious strain on news org budgets; it has also shifted focus somewhat from American news nets to the BBC and Qatar-based Al Jazeera, which has been seeking greater cable distribution in the U.S.Ongoing strife in Libya has affected more than one sector of the news industry; the finance world has paid close attention to the increasingly bloody war in a major OPEC nation. On Thursday, the price of oil continued to fluctuate, dipping when the nation's production rose to 350,000 barrels per day as fighting slowed in recent weeks. The price of light sweet crude for delivery in November fell 21 to $89.50 a barrel on news that Gadhafi had been killed. Contact Sam Thielman at sam.thielman@variety.com