NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg may have stunned the media industry on Tuesday when she erroneously reported that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was retiring, but the veteran journalist is no stranger to gaffes and controversies. The 82-year-old Totenberg, who has been a working journalist for over five decades, published the story headlined, "Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the opinion overturning Roe v.Wade, retires," but quickly replaced it with an editor’s note insisting it was "erroneously published." Totenberg, who then tried to explain the debacle on "All Things Considered," has been no stranger to mistakes and other controversies during her storied career. NPR RETRACTS FALSE REPORT CLAIMING JUSTICE SAMUEL ALITO IS RETIRING FROM THE SUPREME COURTNPR's Nina Totenberg, seen here in 2015.
(Andrew Burton/Getty Images)Totenberg was fired for plagiarism when she worked as a staff writer for the since-shuttered National Observer in 1972, which the Columbia Journalism Review wrote about in 1995. "Totenberg simply took several paragraphs and verbatim quotes from a Washington Post report about former House Speaker Thomas P.O'Neill, who was about to become majority leader, and dropped them into her own story about him, without attributing a single word to the Post," Trudy Lieberman wrote for the CJR. Totenberg admitted that she "should have been punished" when recalling the incident two decades later. "I was in a hurry.
I used terrible judgment," Totenberg told CJR at the time."The fact I used so many direct quotes obligated me morally to credit the Post.
I should have been punished.I have a strong feeling that a young reporter is entitled to one mistake and to have the holy bejeezus scared out of her to never do it again."NPR REVEALS HOW A MISHEARD ANNOUNCEMENT LED TO IT FALSELY CLAIMING JUSTICE ALITO WAS RETIRINGNPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg did not publicly disclose her friendship with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg whi...