The Supreme Court’s 2025-26 term concluded with an unexpected media firestorm after NPR mistakenly reported that Justice Samuel Alito had announced his retirement.
NPR published and then swiftly retracted the story on the same day the court finished delivering its final opinions of the term.
NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg was identified as the reporter behind the erroneous story, which briefly sent shockwaves through the legal and political world.
NPR Public Editor Kelly McBride explained that “NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg misheard an announcement about retirements as she was leaving” the court.
The story had initially included a retrospective on Alito’s tenure, framing the report as a significant moment in the justice’s long career on the bench.
Totenberg herself described the error in stark terms, calling it “the worst professional mistake of my more than 50 years in journalism.”
She confirmed that she had personally sent an apology to Justice Alito following the retraction of the incorrectly published report.
Beyond the media drama, the term itself proved to be one of the most ideologically fractured in recent memory, according to analysts tracking the court’s voting patterns.
In the previous term, just 15.2% of the court’s decisions were decided by a 6-3 vote, with 9% of all decisions representing 6-3 ideological splits along conservative and liberal lines.
This term, those figures rose sharply, with 28.8% of decisions coming in at 6-3 votes and 22.7% of all decisions reflecting clear ideological divides between the court’s conservative and liberal wings.
The jump in ideologically divided rulings signals a court growing more polarised in its decision-making, with the conservative supermajority increasingly flexing its influence across major legal questions.
The term’s closing weeks had already generated significant commentary from legal observers who noted a pattern of sharp disagreements between the justices.
The false retirement story added an unusual coda to a term that had already drawn considerable scrutiny over the court’s direction and the conduct of its members.
For Totenberg, one of the most respected names in legal journalism, the mistake represented a rare and deeply damaging public error in a career spanning more than five decades.
NPR’s handling of the retraction and the public editor’s explanation drew its own scrutiny, raising questions about editorial processes for such a high-profile and politically sensitive story.