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| | July/August 2003 |
 | | Iraqi journalists boast that the first Arabic newspaper, Al Zawra, was printed in Baghdad 135 years ago, and that the nations first television station was launched in 1956, the same year that TV came to Sweden. |
 | | That same year Durgham Hashemi, a young journalist at al Thawra, disappeared a week after he criticized articles in his own newspaper that claimed Iraqs Shiite Arabs came from India. |
 | | Hashem Hassan was briefly jailed, too, and eventually fled to the autonomous Kurdish north early last year, where freedom from Saddams rule since 1991 has ushered in a relatively free press, including several newspapers completely independent of political parties. |
| archives.cjr.org /year/03/4/daragahi.asp (3200 words) |
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