Longtime NPR Supreme Court reporter Nina Totenberg, 82, offered a bizarre explanation for why she ran with a false story claiming conserva...
Longtime NPR Supreme Court reporter Nina Totenberg, 82, offered a bizarre explanation for why she ran with a false story claiming conservative Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito had retired.
On Tuesday morning, NPR published and then retracted a professional obituary of Alito’s time on the bench. The piece, authored by veteran SCOTUS reporter Nina Totenberg, claimed Alito was hanging up his robe minutes after justices handed down landmark cases on transgender athletes and birthright citizenship.
“This is my fault, and only my fault,” Totenberg said in a LiveNOW Fox television interview. “It’s not NPR’s fault, we do pre-write stories about people for when they retire, when they die. … In this case, this was just my fault.”
Totenberg explained that she slipped out of the courtroom before the justices gaveled the blockbuster term to a close.
“And when I realized that nobody was following me, I said to somebody, “What’s going on in there? And I misunderstood the answer, and thought that somebody had suggested that Justice Alito was retiring. I was completely wrong. I wasn’t in the courtroom. This is all on me. This is not on the network,” Totenberg lamented.
Published at 10:51 a.m. ET, the bogus article had the following lede: “Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the Supreme Court’s opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, is retiring, the court announced Tuesday.”
However, the photo caption in NPR’s story said that Alito retired on Friday, which would be July 3.
Minutes later, social media erupted with the possibility that one of the most conservative justices in modern history was leaving the bench, and President Donald Trump would have the chance to nominate a fourth justice to the nation’s highest court months before the November midterm elections.
With no formal announcement from the high court, NPR retracted the entire story, leaving thousands of court watchers on edge with a terse editor’s note: “Earlier today, we erroneously published a story saying that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was retiring. Neither Alito nor the court’s public information office has announced his retirement, and we have retracted the story.”
“It’s the worst mistake I’ve ever made in my more than 50 years as a journalist. I deeply regret it, and I’ve written an apology to Justice Alito,” Totenberg said to FOX.
Below is the full apology she penned to the conservative jurist:
“Dear Justice Alito, there are no words to adequately apologize for today’s error in reporting your retirement. It was entirely my fault. I rushed out of the courtroom after the opinion announcements, and when I realized that the usual rush of folks after a few minutes had not happened, I asked somebody was going on inside, to which the answer was, ‘retirement announcements.’ I didn’t hear the ‘s’ on ‘announcements,’ and I assumed something no reporter should ever do, that you were retiring. It was the worst professional mistake of my more than 50 years in journalism. I could go on, but I don’t know what else to say, except that I am so, so sorry.”
The network did not independently verify the information because the article cited a public announcement rather than confidential sources, The New York Times reported. In damage control, NPR, which has been stripped of much of its public funding, also released a statement later on Tuesday.
“Due to a misunderstanding, NPR’s Supreme Court and Legal Affairs Correspondent Nina Totenberg incorrectly reported that Justice Samuel Alito had retired. Neither Justice Alito nor the Supreme Court Public Information Office has announced his retirement,” NPR Editor in Chief Tommy Evans said. “As soon as the error was realized, the story was retracted and removed from NPR’s website, and an on-air correction was broadcast.”
President Trump moved to end federal funding for NPR last year, saying the outlet has “spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as ‘news.’”
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