NPR’s worst-case scenario
The explanation about NPR’s bogus “Justice Samuel Alito retires” story just doesn’t add up.
Yesterday the Supreme Court correspondent Nina Totenberg said she made a “rookie mistake” when she called in her false report about Alito’s retirement.
But Totenberg’s apology didn’t explain why she automatically believed what she heard secondhand, or why NPR published her report in haste without any other sourcing.
The incident sparked speculation that Totenberg, 82, who has been well-sourced at the court for decades, had some advance knowledge about impending retirement plans. As Vanity Fair’s Maxwell Adler put it, the episode “reignited questions about whether Alito will retire while Republicans control both the White House and Senate rather than risk leaving his seat vacant after the 2026 midterm elections.”
Totenberg did not address that during an on-air mea culpa yesterday afternoon.
So NPR listeners and readers are left wondering if they can trust what the public radio network says. “This was a worst-case scenario for us,” a longtime host told me last night.
On “All Things Considered,” Totenberg read the text of the apology she sent to Alito.
“Dear Justice Alito,” she wrote, “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 what 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.”
Later in the segment, Totenberg indicated that she hurried out of the courtroom to join NPR’s special report about the court’s rulings. She said she should have stayed at the court to hear the substance of what was being announced — staff retirements, it turned out.
“It was the worst professional mistake of my more than 50 years in journalism,” she wrote to Alito. “I could go on, but I don’t know what else to say except that I am so, so sorry.”
But if she heard the phrase “retirement announcement,” why did she assume it was about Alito?
She had a complete prewritten story ready to go about Alito’s retirement, so she called NPR executive editor Krishnadev Calamur with the apparent news, and he went ahead and published it immediately, according to NPR’s public editor, Kelly McBride. The news also went out on NPR’s special report.
NPR’s alert sent other newsrooms scrambling — “NPR Almost Gave Me a Heart Attack,” a writer for The Cut wrote — until the court shot down Totenberg’s story.
It’s worth noting that McBride’s original account of the screwup differed from Totenberg’s account. McBride wrote that as Totenberg “was leaving the court, Chief Justice John Roberts was announcing upcoming retirements. Totenberg misheard Roberts’ statement.”
The implication was that McBride heard Roberts’ voice directly, but Totenberg said she heard secondhand info, which is even worse.
McBride observed that Totenberg’s status as a reporter who has been covering the Supreme Court since 1975 “contributed to the error.”
Calamur told McBride, “She’s in the room. It’s like when we report opinions. I’m not waiting to see what the Times is reporting. It’s when Nina says, ‘here’s what happened,’ and we do it. That’s the trust you build up.”
But in this case, Totenberg wasn’t in the room for the “retirement announcements.”
Thus many DC types are wondering if she was on standby for an Alito announcement and foolishly jumped the gun.
This line in Ben Mullin’s NYT story is also intriguing: “Because the article cited an announcement, rather than confidential sources, the network did not take additional steps to verify the accuracy of the information.”
I asked an NPR spokesperson if there has been, or will be, any disciplinary action taken as a result of this. The spokesperson said they were unaware.
Thomas Evans, NPR’s editor-in-chief, said on air that “we do have systems in place” to avoid mistakes like yesterday’s. “We are trying to be a nimble news organization during breaking news and still be correct at all times, and this is something we should learn from,” Evans said.
“This is a scenario that reporters lose sleep thinking about,” Charlie Warzel wrote for The Atlantic.
He said you could make an argument “that such errors have never been costlier in an era when trust in media has never been lower, or that the very dynamics that push legacy news outlets to rush and lose credibility are the very ones that reward shock jocks and those peddling misleading information.”
But Warzel went a different way, arguing that there wasn’t as much fallout as one might have expected. It’s possible, he said, “that on an internet dominated by gambling sites, news influencers, propagandists, slop, and gossip, it is not nearly as scandalous as it once was to be colossally wrong for a few minutes.”
Maybe. But it’s still not acceptable.
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This edition of Reliable Sources was edited by Luciana Lopez and produced with Liam Reilly. Email us your feedback and tips here.