Voting Rights Bill Blocked by Parties Unknown—According to Headlines

Julie Hollar

Reuters' headline (1/20/21) put the emphasis on the Democrats' failure rather than the Republicans' success.

With the GOP leaning ever more heavily on a strategy of voter suppression and election manipulation to gain power, Democrats finally made an effort to stop some of those maneuvers by bringing a voting rights bill before the Senate. But Wednesday's unified GOP filibuster—and the refusal by Democratic senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin to modify Senate rules to allow a majority vote on this one bill—killed the attempt.

To the New York Times headline writers (1/19/21), the story went: "After a Day of Debate, the Voting Rights Bill Is Blocked in the Senate." Their counterparts at CNN.com (1/19/21) chose: "Senate Democrats Suffer Defeat on Voting Rights After Vote to Change Rules Fails." At Reuters (1/20/21): "US Senate Democrats Fail in Bid to Pass Voting Rights Bill."

The morning after the late-night vote (1/20/21), the Washington Post's homepage version of its headline read: "Voting Rights Bill Effectively Dead as Senate Rejects Filibuster Change."

None of those headlines were given top billing, at least not by late morning Eastern Standard Time. By lunchtime, the Post's headline had dropped out of the Top Stories section, and CNN.com was giving its top slot to "A Look at Biden's First Year in False Claims" (1/20/22).

CNN's lead example (1/20/22) of factchecking Biden was whether the president had falsely claimed to have once driven an 18-wheeler.

But notice what—or more precisely, who—is missing from all the headlines. We don't even get a nod to any responsible actor. ("Bill Killed in GOP-Involved Filibuster," anyone?)

The Washington press corps seems much more comfortable identifying democracy-endangering GOP obstructionism when framing it as a story about Democrats. In an extraordinarily rare instance of a story that that acknowledged the GOP as the main culprit, New York Times congressional reporter Jonathan Weisman  (1/19/21) managed nevertheless to make the focus Democratic infighting and impotence in a story with the subhead, "Prominent Democrats are expressing rage at their party’s two filibuster holdouts, rather than at Republicans who have blocked their voting rights bill." Weisman wrote:

The remarkable vitriol Democratic activists are training on two members of their own party has largely given Republicans a pass for blocking the bill and standing by new state laws devised to limit access to the ballot box and empower partisan actors to administer elections and count votes.

Manchin and Sinema surely deserve intense scrutiny for their corrupt and anti-democratic role in this chapter of our country's history. But how many times have the supposedly moderate GOP senators that the press corps so praised over their work on the bipartisan infrastructure bill been named in a headline about the voting rights bills? It's not Democratic activists at fault for "giving Republicans a pass" here—but don't hold your breath waiting for journalists to take responsibility for their own role in the withering of a democracy their corporate owners have little interest in defending.