On a big morning for more decisions being handed down by the Supreme Court, NPR apparently decided to send conservatives and liberals alike into a tailspin by publishing a report that claimed conservative Justice Samuel Alito was retiring.
“Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the Supreme Court’s opinion reversing Roe v. Wade, is retiring, the court announced Tuesday,” the first line of the story read, according to an archived version of it.
The article, written by longtime legal affairs/Supreme Court correspondent Nina Totenberg, 82, went live around 10:50 a.m. Eastern Time on Tuesday, but NPR retracted it about five minutes later.
In place of the story they likely pre-wrote (a standard media practice for retirements, deaths, etc) that contained their opinion of Alito’s judicial history was this short 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.
Why was it yanked? The story wasn’t true, NPR editor-in-chief Thomas Evans asserted soon after, claiming it was published “due to a misunderstanding”:
When Totenberg appeared on the program, she read the apology letter she sent to Alito, giving a bizarre explanation that was astonishing considering she’s been with NPR for 50 years and understands very well how a story like this must go through checks and balances first:
“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.”
Meanwhile, here’s how NPR Public Editor Kelly McBride tried to explain it:
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.[…]In the minutes after it was published, Totenberg called Calamur to tell him she was mistaken.”I was looking to see who else was reporting it, and nobody was reporting it, and then, basically, we realized that it was not true,” Calamur said. “She called and said, ‘I made a mistake,’ and we rushed to make a retraction.”[…]”She’s the preeminent Supreme Court reporter in the courtroom,” Calamur said. “So I’m assuming that’s what she heard. … 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.”
McBride would also say on her LinkedIn page that it boiled down to “confirmation bias” on Totenberg’s part:
Adding to the confusion in the aftermath was that NPR was having to make corrections to its explainer:
Their frenzied clean-up effort was leading to more questions than answers. Was it wishful thinking? Why would she have just assumed the retirement announcement was about Alito? Or was this an embargoed story that simply went out a few days/weeks too soon?
In the mad dash to figure out the mystery, some on social media are speculating that Alito used the canary trap tactic to try and flush out the SCOTUS leaker:
New York Post writer Miranda Devine offered these observations:
The only way the Totenberg-Alito story makes sense is that this veteran NPR legal reporter had a trusted and highly placed source inside SCOTUS who confirmed that Alito was retiring.- No editor would publish such a story unless the reporter were reliable.- A reliable reporter does not say ‘oh I thought I heard something’ without double-checking with a source to confirm. Ideally she would call Alito to confirm as well.- But somehow Totenberg and her editors at NPR were satisfied that her sourcing was impeccable without official on the record confirmation.- That leaves a very small list of suspects: someone close to Alito who was very confident that he was retiring.- As people have speculated, Alito may have planted a false tale to catch out the leaker: a canary trap. Now what?
Inquiring minds want to know!
– Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via X. –
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY