NPR’s Retracted Story About Alito Retiring Sparks Speculation It Might Soon Prove True: ‘Sure Wonder If That Was Embargoed’

AP Photo/Charles Dharapak, File

NPR and its longtime legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg had to make an embarrassing retraction Tuesday after reporting that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was retiring — but certain aspects of the kerfuffle had commentators abuzz that the story may soon prove true after all.

Totenberg’s article initially reported that Alito was retiring as the nation’s highest court wrapped the release of several major opinions, including striking down President Donald Trump’s executive order that sought to end birthright citizenship.

Shortly after the article was published, a moderator in the live chat at SCOTUSblog that had been discussing the morning’s opinions noted that the court’s public information officer “just emphasized that the court has not made any announcement to that effect.”

NPR retracted the article and replaced it with an author’s note saying that it was “erroneously published,” and the nonprofit media organization’s editor in chief Tommy Evans issued a statement:

Due to a misunderstanding, NPR’s Supreme Court and Legal Affairs Correspondent Nina Totenberg incorrectly reported that Justice Samuel Alito had retired,” said Evans in the statement. “Neither Justice Alito nor the Supreme Court Public Information Office has announced his retirement. As soon as the error was realized, the story was retracted and removed from NPR’s website and an on-air correction was broadcast.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. This afternoon, Mrs. Totenberg will appear on All Things Considered to explain what happened. She has reached out to Justice Alito to apologize.

The New York Times’ news and entertainment reporter Ben Mullin noted that NPR’s original “erroneous” report spread quickly as it was “published on other public radio member sites that syndicate the network’s coverage” and pushed in breaking news alerts “elsewhere in the news media,” causing a ripple effect of these media outlets having to “issue their own retractions.”

Mullin further reported that Totenberg’s article missed some of the “additional steps to verify the accuracy of the information” before publication because her report “cited an announcement, rather than confidential sources.”

Part of the reason the story spread so quickly was likely the rumors that had been circulating that Alito was eyeing retirement. The 76-year-old justice has served on the Supreme Court for two decades since he was appointed by President George W. Bush. He is the second-oldest justice after Clarence Thomas, 78, and was briefly hospitalized in February after falling ill at a Federalist Society dinner.

Totenberg’s long and storied career reporting on the Supreme Court also lent credence to the report — and caused numerous people to wonder if this was not just the accidental publication of a prewrite, but also a reveal that Totenberg had a scoop pending. She has been at NPR since 1975, one of the “Founding Mothers” of the public broadcaster along with Susan Stamberg, Linda Wertheimer, and Cokie Roberts, who made names for themselves as trailblazing journalists in a media environment that was still very much plagued by misogyny.

Throughout Totenberg’s decades of reporting on the court, she has developed deeply placed sources, including several of the justices themselves. Her obituary for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg after the jurist’s death in 2020, which shared details about their nearly half-century friendship sparked controversy over whether she should have revealed the close relationship to NPR’s audience as a conflict of interest. Totenberg was also friends with Justice Antonin Scalia — and had similarly disclosed their friendship after he died in 2016.

Political commentator and former Hill staffer Dan Turrentine had a reaction many shared when he noted “who was reporting” on Alito’s alleged retirement — meaning Totenberg — and wrote, “I sure wonder if that was embargoed and we will hear news later this week.”

Puck News’ Peter Hamby commented that if Totenberg had authored “an Alito retirement pre-write,” then “we should probably expect Alito to announce his retirement at some point soon.”

Others noted that the archived version of the article suggested it might have been intended for publication on Friday, lending support to the theory this was caused by an inadvertently broken embargo.

A sampling of other reactions is below.

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