Site icon The Daily Signal

Nina Totenberg Shreds Journalistic Ethics at NPR

NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg, left, and since-deceased Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg hold a discussion at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival on Jan. 21, 2018, in Park City, Utah. As a journalist, Totenberg had an improperly close, personal relationship with a newsmaker she reported on. (Photo: Robin Marchant/Getty Images)

Shamelessly liberal NPR Supreme Court reporter Nina Totenberg hit The New York Times bestseller list with her new book “Dinners with Ruth,” celebrating five decades of flouting any notion of media ethics with her pal Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The commercial objective is fairly clear. It’s time to cash in with all of the libertine leftists who bought buckets of “Notorious RBG” merchandise. It’s no surprise this book is a hit with public radio progressives. NPR cranked up its own taxpayer-funded publicity machine to goose the sales, including:

In each interview, they would touch on the ethical questions raised by the Totenberg-Ginsburg alliance. Each time, Totenberg blustered past the questions. This was no secret arrangement. Totenberg palled around with Ginsburg at the Glamour magazine “Woman of the Year Awards,” and at the Sundance Film Festival to promote CNN’s saccharine “RBG” documentary.

She uncorked a six-and-a-half-minute segment on NPR promoting the book “The Notorious RBG” and Ginsburg’s ascension to “cultural icon” status. Only after Ginsburg died, NPR’s public editor confessed, “NPR Should Have Revealed Totenberg-RBG Friendship Earlier.”

At the time, Totenberg comically claimed, “I have never shaded my reporting because of my friendship with Justice Ginsburg.”

Her reporting is perpetually tilted to the left. In the PBS interview, Totenberg sounded her usual Supreme Court notes: “There are six very conservative justices. It’s probably a court more conservative than any court in maybe 90 years” (even John Roberts!). Over the years, she warned that almost every Republican nominee was “very, very conservative” and sure to ruin everything. After Anthony Kennedy retired, Totenberg even said it was “the end of the world as we know it.”

There were liberal journalists who were bothered by the flagrant Totenberg-Ginsburg chumminess. At Politico, Michael Schaffer wrote, “Could you imagine a congressional reporter doing a book called ‘Dinners With Harry Reid,’ tracing shopping excursions and intimate family moments with the late majority leader, who died the year after Ginsburg?”

None of this matters at all to Totenberg. She bathed in all the fawning attention that came from her friendship with Ginsburg, and she’s still cashing in on it. If Washington is described as a swamp, she’s the scaliest Swamp Thing.

The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.

Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the url or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.

Exit mobile version