‘I Am So, So Sorry’: NPR Reporter Apologizes to Samuel Alito Over Retracted Retirement Story

AP Photo/Andrew Medichini

NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg wrote an apology to Justice Samuel Alito after she published a report about his alleged retirement, which has since been retracted.

On Tuesday, NPR briefly sent shockwaves through Washington, D.C., when it ran a story about Alito retiring. The piece was up for only a few minutes before being replaced with an editor’s note stating that the article was “published in error.”

“Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the Supreme Court’s opinion reversing Roe v. Wade, is retiring, the court announced Tuesday,” the article began. Despite the retraction, some speculated that the story is true but under embargo and that Totenberg jumped the gun. After the mishap, NPR claimed Totenberg had misheard an announcement at the Supreme Court on Tuesday.

“NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg misheard an announcement about retirements as she was leaving the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday,” the outlet said. “As a result, an NPR headline erroneously claimed that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was retiring.”

CNN’s Brian Stelter obtained the text of an apology from Totenberg to Alito. It read:

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, 82, has been with NPR since 1975.

Alito, 76, has served on the court since 2006. There has been speculation that Alito and Clarence Thomas, 78, might retire before this year’s midterms to allow President Donald Trump to appoint replacements for the two conservative justices while Republicans control the Senate.

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