Happy Friday. We figured this news would drop on a weekender. Justice Samuel Alito has a message for the Democratic activists, the liberal legal commentariat, and every progressive who has spent the last year fantasizing about his retirement: not happening. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Alito confirmed he will serve another term on the Supreme Court. He’s staying. The 6-3 conservative majority is staying. Every nightmare scenario the left has been constructing around Alito’s potential departure can be filed away – at least for now.
The announcement itself matters less than what preceded it – because NPR already made this story embarrassing for everyone involved before Alito even had to say a word. On the final day of Supreme Court opinions in June, National Public Radio – your tax dollars at work – published a piece reporting that Alito was retiring. The story caused a minor national shockwave. Liberal America dared to hope. Conservative America braced. And then everyone discovered that the story was wrong. Completely, embarrassingly, unprofessionally wrong. The retraction and explanation were, if anything, worse than the original error. NPR’s Nina Totenberg – the veteran Supreme Court reporter who has covered the institution for decades – claimed she had misheard an announcement. Then that explanation turned out not to be accurate either. A blog post explaining the error was subsequently updated after Totenberg went on All Things Considered to explain what happened, producing a correction to the correction.
NPR’s Embarrassing Reporting Error
To summarize: NPR published a false story about Samuel Alito retiring. Then published a false blog post about how the false story was published. Then corrected the false explanation after the false explanation became the story. Alito has been one of the conservative majority’s most unapologetic voices – and by
