In what Megyn called a “humiliating” error, NPR erroneously ran a report on Tuesday claiming U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito had retired.
The stunning story – which came from semi-retired, long-time SCOTUS correspondent Nina Totenberg – was retracted five minutes later after the Supreme Court issued a rare rebuke. That left NPR and Totenberg with egg on their face, and the attempted cleanup only made matters worse.
On Wednesday’s show, Megyn was joined by Matt Taibbi, editor of Racket News on Substack, to discuss the embarrassing snafu and why NPR’s explanation doesn’t add up.
The Retracted Report
Rumors about Alito retiring have been circulating for months, and Megyn has reported that her own sources indicate he could be preparing to leave the bench. But she said Totenberg and NPR committed the cardinal sin of Supreme Court reporting when they definitively reported the news prior to a formal announcement.
“I had heard, and I’ve reported this on the show before, that he is likely to step down. I’ve heard that from people who know, but… that is totally different from [reporting] he is retiring, it’s happening, there has been an announcement. That is a very, very different kettle of fish,” Megyn explained. “But she goes with it; we see it on our team; I reach out to my own sources, who say it’s not true; and by the time I went back to my team… NPR had taken it down.”
Reacting to the report on Tuesday’s show, Megyn said whoever at NPR was responsible for publishing the story and allowing it to go to air should publicly take responsibility. As it turns out, Totenberg herself took the fall.
What Went Wrong
Totenberg appeared on All Things Considered Tuesday afternoon to explain the situation and read the text of the apology she sent to Alito.
“I scared everybody half to death for about five minutes,” she admitted on radio program. “It’s entirely on me. It’s not anybody else’s fault.”
She then read her apology: “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.”
Totenberg went on to call it a “rookie mistake” and said she hasn’t heard back from the justice. Megyn said such a characterization is “an insult to rookies.”
NPR, meanwhile, offered a similar retelling in its mea culpa:
“NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg misheard an announcement about retirements as she was leaving the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday. As a result, an NPR headline erroneously claimed that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was retiring. The headline sat atop a lengthy story that recapped the conservative justice’s tenure. The error was also reported on NPR’s airwaves. Alito is not retiring. The story was wrong.”
As is customary in a newsroom, NPR said it had the lengthy story about Alito’s retirement pre-written. Totenberg apparently spoke with both her intern on the ground and NPR executive editor Krishnadev Calamur to tell them what she misheard. Calamur then “surfaced the story that NPR had previously prepared for the day Alito did announce his retirement and published it.”
Calamur told NPR public editor Kelly McBride they “profoundly regret the error and the confusion that this has caused” and suggested Totenberg’s lengthy tenure (she has covered the high court for NPR since 1975) contributed to the journalistic malpractice.
“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.”
Misplaced Trust
That trust, in Megyn’s view, is misplaced due to Totenberg’s own track record. “The editors said they trust Nina implicitly; she’s so holier than thou over there… [And] because she said it was an announcement, as opposed to, like, ‘I have an inside scoop’… they didn’t use their emergency backup system of triple checking all stories before they go on the air… She [incorrectly] told them there was an announcement from the bench… which is so crazy,” she explained.
“This is absolutely a fireable offense, even for Nina Totenberg,” Megyn added. “She has a history of not calling it straight, and by the way, she has made errors too.”
As Megyn noted, there was obvious bias in the framing of the report. The headline for the since-delated article was “Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, retires.”
Compare that to the title of Totenberg’s obit when her close personal friend – and subject of her 2022 memoir Dinners with Ruth – Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. That headline read: “Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Champion Of Gender Equality, Dies At 87.”
And then there are the refuted reports. “She is the one who reported that Justice [Neil] Gorsuch had refused to put on a mask when Chief Justice [John Roberts] asked him to around COVID time, and that [Justice] Sonia Sotomayor was so offended she didn’t participate in oral arguments, that she did it remotely,” Megyn recalled.
“She was 100 percent wrong. She was so wrong that both Justices Gorsuch and Sotomayor issued a rare joint refutation of Nina’s reporting,” Megyn continued. “She’s had other things that she’s just gotten egregiously wrong. This woman’s been getting a pass for far too long. She is passed her journalism prime, as these mistakes are proving.”
Something’s Fishy
Even so, Taibbi and Megyn both found the explanations from Totenberg and NPR to be suspect. He wondered if Totenberg was perhaps “falling on sword” for somebody else.
“The first thing I thought of when she was giving that excuse is that what actually happened was that somebody she knows and who’s been a good source for her, you know, blew her up, and she’s covering for that person by giving the story that’s so unbelievable and embarrassing to her personally that there won’t be anybody asking about a source who got something wrong,” Taibbi speculated.
He said the explanation is so “unbelievable” and “embarrassing,” however, that it is hard to fathom making it up for that purpose. “Like, if you were going to come up with another story about how it was your fault, you would come up with something different than this, wouldn’t you,” he asked.
Megyn believes there “has got to be another shoe to drop here” because one cannot overstate how egregious this reporting breakdown really was.
“I just can’t stress enough… That is plutonium you are handling if you get news like that as a Supreme Court reporter… There is only nine of them. The retirements are spaced out by years. It is a huge deal when there is a vacancy on the high court. If you get a scoop like that, it has to be handled so carefully, so professionally, so responsibly,” she explained.
That is what makes Totenberg’s decision to run with hearsay so hard to believe. “I would not go to air with that unless I heard it directly from the justice or the justice’s spouse. That’s it. Those are the only two people who could make me do it; not even another justice could convince me to do it,” Megyn noted. “So for her to say, ‘I misheard from the bench that there was a retirement announcement, period,’ not even about a justice, never mind this justice… it’s just insane. I can’t get past it.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Taibbi by tuning in to episode 1,351 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s The Megyn Kelly Channel (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.