How did the Arab media cover the election?

Hassan Fattah provides an interesting answer in the New York Times:

Sometime after the first insurgent attack in Iraq on Sunday morning, news directors at Arab satellite channels and newspaper editors found themselves facing an altogether new decision. Should they report on the violence, or continue to cover the elections themselves? After nearly two years of providing up-to-the-minute images of explosions and mayhem, and despite months of predictions of a blood bath on election day, some news directors said they found the decision surprisingly easy to make. The violence simply was not the story on Sunday morning; the voting was. Overwhelmingly, Arab channels and newspapers greeted the elections as a critical event with major implications for the region, and many put significant resources into reporting on the voting, providing blanket coverage throughout the country that started about a week ago. Newspapers kept wide swaths of their pages open, and the satellite channels dedicated most of the day to coverage of the polls…. For many Arabs, the strong turnout on election day proved a unique opening, one that made the debate on television screens more nuanced. On Al Jazeera, especially, many Iraqis lauded the process even as analysts from other Arab countries and Iraqis tied to the former government of Saddam Hussein denounced the elections for having occurred under occupation, and for having been centered on sectarian issues. “Things used to be a negotiation between political parties where you scratch my back and I scratch your back,” noted one commentator, Abas al-Bayati, on Al Jazeera. “Now, this new government will approach all the parties as having the backing of the people. It will have legitimacy.” And that legitimacy should allow the government to face down the insurgents, he added. With the relative lack of violence, many nerves appeared calmed. Iraqis, especially, may have been emboldened by the coverage.

Read the whole thing. One wonders whether the election coverage will embolden residents of the Middle East beyond the borders of Iraq. UPDATE: In Slate, Michael Young provides another rundown of how the Middle Eastern media covered the election. It has a great opening paragraph:

If there was one message from the Iraqi election on Sunday, it was that newspapers are often vast repositories of conventional wisdom just begging for demolition. What had been broadly pegged by the media in recent months as a likely “illegitimate” election that might lead to an Iraqi civil war appeared to be nothing of the sort (even though 36 people died and nearly 100 others were injured in insurgent attacks). On Monday, the international press was scrambling to make up for having been so wide of the mark.

This would apparently include the New York Times editorial page, as Andrew Sullivan observes.