RedState reported earlier on how, amid the flurry of Supreme Court decisions that were handed down on Tuesday, NPR decided to drop a bombshell story about how conservative Justice Samuel Alito was allegedly retiring.
The first line of an archived version of the story, which was retracted about five minutes after it went up, claimed that "Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the Supreme Court's opinion reversing Roe v. Wade, is retiring, the court announced Tuesday." The story then took a look back at Alito's conservative track record. While some suggested it was wishful thinking from NPR, many speculated they may have mistakenly published a "pre-write," which are stories many news outlets put together sometimes years ahead of time to have ready to go in the event a public figure retires, passes away, etc.
The editor's note that appears on the page as of this writing reads, "Earlier today, we erroneously published a story saying that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was retiring. Neither Alito nor the court's public information office has announced his retirement, and we have retracted the story."
READ MORE: What in the World? NPR's Anti-Alito Wishcasting Ends With an Awkward Retraction
As we also noted, in a statement issued soon after, NPR's editor-in-chief, Thomas Evans, boiled down what happened to a "misunderstanding," and said the person who wrote it, longtime Supreme Court correspondent Nina Totenberg, 82, would explain later in the day on their "All Things Considered" program as to what happened, and stressed that she had reached out to Justice Alito to offer an apology.
In an update to this story, Totenberg, who was a close friend of the late leftist Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, has indeed given her official explainer. And it is straight out of Bizarroville:
Nina Totenberg just spoke on "All Things Considered" and said her mistaken report about Alito retiring was a "rookie mistake."
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) June 30, 2026
"It's entirely on me. It's not anybody else's fault," she said.
She also read the text of the apology note she sent to Alito:
"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."
As others observed, however, this wasn't actually Totenberg's first big SCOTUS reporting mistake:
This is, by the way, the second time Totenberg made major SCOTUS news because her reporting was confused and not adequately overseen: a story from her rocketed around the Internet during COVID that Gorsuch ignored a Roberts request to wear a mask on the bench, forcing Sotomayor to dial in remotely, which Roberts denied, forcing her to admit she didn't actually know what the Roberts request was.
This is, by the way, the second time Totenberg made major SCOTUS news because her reporting was confused and not adequately overseen: a story from her rocketed around the Internet during COVID that Gorsuch ignored a Roberts request to wear a mask on the bench, forcing Sotomayor…
— Patrick Brennan (@ptbrennan11) June 30, 2026
But back to the Alito story, neither Totenberg's apology nor NPR's public editor, Kelly McBride, bothered to explain why she "assumed" it was Alito who was retiring and ran with it without doing rigorous checks and balances that media outlets are supposed to do in situations of this nature. The only thing the public editor shared as to why they published it without going the extra mile was that it came from Totenberg, whom they implicitly trusted to get it right, considering she's been there since 1975.
In this later clip, however, Totenberg suggests that she mistakenly thought she heard someone say that Alito was retiring:
Spoke with NPR's Nina Totenberg about the birthright citizenship decision. The longtime SCOTUS reporter also cleared up what happened today with the story about Justice Alito retiring that was quickly retracted. @livenowfox pic.twitter.com/mSeRKVpYez
— Andy Mac (@ItsAndyMac_) June 30, 2026
In any event, Totenberg's explainer, which is hard for even CNN media apologist Brian Stelter to believe considering her decades of experience, is only fueling speculation that an Alito retirement really is imminent, and that NPR mistakenly published an "embargoed story" before they were supposed to.
I'm not buying that argument, especially when you consider the fact that, if Alito was going to give any media outlet a heads-up, it would not be NPR. But considering NPR's botched handling of both the fake story and the aftermath of it, it's hardly a surprise that's the conclusion some political/media observers have reached.
Editor’s Note: The 2026 Midterms will determine the fate of President Trump’s America First agenda. Republicans must maintain control of both chambers of Congress.
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