The US public broadcasting organization National Public Radio (NPR) on Tuesday took the unusual step of formally retracting a major news story, after it published what seemed like a bombshell scoop that the supreme court justice Samuel Alito was retiring.
The story was written by Nina Totenberg, 82, one of the most prominent chroniclers of the supreme court in American media. NPR later explained that Totenberg had misheard a court announcement about upcoming retirements.
The nearly 1,200-word story was completely removed and replaced with the following editor’s note: “Earlier today we erroneously published a story saying that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was retiring. He has not announced his retirement and we have retracted the story.”
The opening paragraph of the story cited a “court announcement” that Alito was retiring, but no announcement had been made at the time of publication.
Patricia McCabe, a spokesperson for the court, told NBC News that “NPR’s reporting regarding Justice Alito is inaccurate” and that “their reporting that there was any kind of court statement is inaccurate”.
On Tuesday afternoon, NPR’s top editor, Thomas Evans, chalked the errant publication up to a “misunderstanding”.
“Neither Justice Alito nor the Supreme Court Public Information Office has announced his retirement,” Evans said in the statement. “As soon as the error was realized, the story was retracted and removed from NPR’s website and an on-air correction was broadcast. We regret the error and any confusion this may have caused.”
Journalistic ethics expert Kelly McBride, who serves as NPR’s public editor, published a story on Tuesday afternoon clarifying what happened. The error stemmed from Totenberg mishearing an announcement made by Chief Justice John Roberts about upcoming retirements.
“NPR had the lengthy story about Alito’s retirement already written, because that’s what newsrooms do in anticipation of significant retirements and even deaths,” McBride wrote. “Totenberg spoke with both her intern, who was at the court with her, and NPR executive editor Krishnadev Calamur, and told them what she heard. Calamur surfaced the story that NPR had previously prepared for the day Alito did announce his retirement and published it.”
Totenberg appeared on NPR on Tuesday afternoon and called it a “rookie mistake”, saying: “This is on me, and only me.”
She also read from a letter that she sent to Alito apologizing for the error. “It was the worst professional mistake of my more than 50 years of journalism,” she wrote. “I could go on, but I don’t know what else to say, other than to say that I am so, so sorry.”
Totenberg said she had not heard back from Alito, but added: “I didn’t expect to hear back from him. It’s my mistake. We in the press corps always want people to own up to their mistakes, and they most of the time don’t. So I am not going to do that.”
Evans, appearing on NPR’s broadcast with Totenberg, said: “As editor in chief, I feel ultimate responsibility for anything that NPR is reporting.”
Totenberg’s story was a sprawling account of Alito’s career. “Throughout his tenure, he played a key role on the court, often leading the conservative charge, not just on abortion, but for expanded religious rights, against LGBTQ+ rights, against expanded voting rights, for the death penalty, against labor unions, and more,” she wrote.
The story notes prominently that Alito wrote the opinion in the court’s historic 2022 decision overturning Roe v Wade.
“In the history of the Supreme Court, the names of just a few justices are linked with a single very famous, or infamous, decision,” Totenberg, who has worked at NPR since 1975, wrote. “Chief Justice John Marshall for his groundbreaking decision in 1803, declaring that courts have the power to strike down laws that violate the Constitution. Chief Justice Roger Taney for his infamous decision in the Dred Scott case declaring that no African American, enslaved or free, could be a citizen of the United states, a decision that led in part to the Civil War; Chief Justice Earl Warren for his 1954 decision declaring racial segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional.
“And in our own times, Alito’s name is indelibly linked with the court’s opinion overturning a half century’s worth of decisions declaring that women have a right to abortion.”
There was also evidence that the story was a work in progress. In the second-to-last paragraph, a Yale University law professor was quoted as saying that Alito “took sown [sic] Roe versus Wade. So that’s how he he [sic] will be forever remembered.”
