NPR’s Totenberg Apologizes for False Alito Retirement Report
NPR legal correspondent Nina Totenberg apologized to Justice Samuel Alito after mistakenly reporting his retirement based on mishearing a plural reference to retirements at the Supreme Court.
A veteran journalist at NPR issued a public apology this week after falsely reporting that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was stepping down from the bench, marking what she described as the worst mistake of her five-decade career in journalism.
Nina Totenberg, who serves as NPR’s legal affairs correspondent, addressed the error during an appearance on the network’s All Things Considered podcast on Tuesday, according to Breitbart News. The false report had briefly circulated before being corrected.
Taking full responsibility for the blunder, Totenberg characterized her error as a rookie mistake and made clear that no other staff members were at fault.
During the broadcast, Totenberg read aloud the personal apology she had sent directly to Justice Alito. In her message, she explained that she had hurried out of the courtroom following opinion announcements and, noticing that the typical crowd exodus had not occurred, asked someone what was happening inside.
The response she received referenced retirement announcements—plural—but Totenberg misheard, failing to catch the “s” that indicated multiple retirements were being discussed, not specifically Alito’s. She then made an assumption that violated basic reporting protocol.
The correspondent acknowledged that the incident represented the most serious professional failure in her more than 50 years covering legal affairs. Her written apology to Alito expressed profound regret and admitted she struggled to find adequate words for the mistake.
NPR had already prepared an obituary-style retirement story for Alito, a standard practice among news organizations that maintain pre-written pieces for sudden retirements or deaths of major public figures. Once Totenberg relayed the information she believed she had heard, NPR Executive Editor Krishnadev Calamur pulled up the prepared story and published it immediately.
The false report went live on NPR’s website at 10:51 a.m. Eastern Time and remained visible for approximately five minutes before being removed and replaced with an editor’s note by 10:57 a.m., as Breitbart News reports. The story remained accessible on certain member station websites for longer periods. NPR was providing special live coverage of a Supreme Court decision regarding birthright citizenship at the time of the error.
The network corrected the false information on its broadcast at 11:07 a.m. Eastern Time. Totenberg had been at the courthouse with an intern when the confusion occurred, and she consulted with both the intern and Calamur before the story was disseminated across NPR’s platforms and airwaves.
With information from Breitbart News
