An inaccurate news story set off a furor Tuesday morning over the possibility that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito had retired.
NPR published the report by Supreme Court correspondent Nina Totenberg just before 11 a.m. ET, declaring that Alito had announced the end of his 20-year career on the high court. But the story was quickly retracted and replaced by a note that the story had been “erroneously published.”
Totenberg, a distinguished legal reporter who has covered the court for decades, addressed the error on NPR’s radio show “All Things Considered” on Tuesday afternoon and reached out to Alito with an apology.
“It’s entirely on me. It’s not anybody else’s fault, and I’ve written to Justice Alito to apologize,” Totenberg said on the radio show, reading aloud the letter she sent him.
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“There are no words to adequately apologize for today’s error in reporting your retirement. It was entirely my fault,” Totenberg read. She said that as she was leaving court, she had asked someone why no one else was rushing out of the courtroom like usual, to which they had replied, “retirement announcements.”
“I assumed, something that no reporter should ever do, that you were retiring. It was the worst professional mistake of my more than 50 years in journalism,” she said in her letter to Alito.
The publication’s editor-in-chief, Tommy Evans, said in a statement shortly after the story was retracted that it had been published “due to a misunderstanding” by Totenberg.
“Neither Justice Alito nor the Supreme Court Public Information Office has announced his retirement,” Evans said. “... We regret the error and any confusion this may have caused.”
The story was picked up by at least one other major outlet, Vox, which published its own piece falsely reporting Alito’s retirement on Tuesday morning. The digital news site also issued a retraction.
“Vox published a story mentioning Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s retirement based on inaccurate reporting from another outlet and has since retracted the story,” an editor’s note on the website read.
“What a nightmare for NPR,” Kelsey Dallas, the managing editor of SCOTUSblog, said on a live chat monitoring Supreme Court decisions Tuesday morning.
Chatter about Alito’s retirement has long circulated. Kalshi betters placed the odds of the 76-year-old justice retiring before Jan. 1, 2027, at about 45% before the NPR story was published Tuesday. Bets spiked for about an hour before returning to pre-publication levels after the story was retracted.
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