IRAQIS ARE SOAKING UP FREE MEDIA now that Saddam’s censorship is over:

“Now I am a free man,” says Salih in halting English. “How could we have lived under this regime?”

How, indeed? But here’s the most amusing part:

His friend, Abbas Ali, concurs. “We used to go to sleep at 10 p.m. Now we stay up until 4 or 5 a.m. because we can’t get enough.” Still desperate for war news, they tune to CNN, BBC, and what appears to be a local favorite, Fox. They like it, people here say, because it has been the most supportive of the war.

For many here, the only foreign channels they can understand are in Arabic, and they are deeply resentful of the most prominent one, Qatar-based Al-Jazeera.

Abu Bakr Mohammed Amin, an elderly man in a red-checkered headdress visiting Salih’s television shop, gives them a dismissive flick of the wrist: “They only knew how to support Saddam,” he says.

Ouch.