Nina Totenberg

American journalist (born 1944)

Nina Totenberg (born January 14, 1944) is an American legal affairs correspondent for National Public Radio (NPR) focusing primarily on the activities and politics of the Supreme Court of the United States. Her reports air regularly on NPR's news magazines All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and Weekend Edition. From 1992 to 2013, she was also a panelist on the syndicated TV political commentary show Inside Washington. She's considered one of NPR's "Founding Mothers" along with Susan Stamberg, Linda Wertheimer and the late Cokie Roberts. Newsweek magazine called her "the creme de la creme" of NPR, and Vanity Fair refers to her as "Queen of the Leaks". a real estate broker, and violinist Roman Totenberg. Her father was a Polish Jewish immigrant, who lost many of his family members in the Holocaust. She moved on to the Peabody Times in Peabody, Massachusetts and Roll Call in Washington, D. C.

At the National Observer, Totenberg began covering legal affairs. In 1971, she broke a story about a secret list of candidates President Richard Nixon was considering for the Supreme Court. All the candidates were later rejected as unqualified by the American Bar Association, and none were nominated. Many of Totenberg's colleagues have defended her, noting that the use of previously reported quotes was a common journalistic practice in the 1970s.

She next worked for the New York City based news magazine New Times. At that publication, she wrote a celebrated article called "The Ten Dumbest Members of Congress", prompting the senator at the top of the list, William L. Scott, to call a press conference to deny that he was the "dumbest member of Congress."

In 1975, Nina Totenberg was hired by Bob Zelnick to work at National Public Radio and has been there since. In 1977, Totenberg broke a story about the Supreme Court appeal of three men who had been convicted in the Watergate scandal: H. R. Haldeman, John N. Mitchell, and John D. Ehrlichman. Totenberg revealed the results of their secret 5–3 vote against reviewing the case and that the three dissenters were appointees of President Richard Nixon. Nixon had resigned three years earlier in the wake of Watergate. Totenberg also revealed that Nixon appointed Chief Justice Warren Burger delayed announcing the vote results, hoping to sway his fellow justices. In 1986, Totenberg broke the story that William H. Rehnquist, who was nominated for Chief Justice of the United States by Ronald Reagan, had written a memo in 1970 opposing the Equal Rights Amendment, in which he said that the amendment would "hasten the dissolution of the family" and that would "virtually abolish all legal distinctions between men and women." The memo was written when Rehnquist was head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel in the Nixon Administration. Totenberg broke the story that Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg, who had been nominated to the Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan, had smoked marijuana "on a few occasions" during his student days in the 1960s and while an assistant professor at Harvard Law School in the 1970s, something that did not appear in Ginsburg's FBI background check. The revelations resulted in Ginsburg's withdrawing his name from consideration. Totenberg was awarded the 1988 Alfred I. duPont Columbia University Silver Baton award for outstanding broadcast journalism for the story. Totenberg's report about Hill's allegations led the Senate Judiciary Committee to re open Thomas's Supreme Court confirmation hearings to consider Hill's charges. Totenberg was criticized by many of Thomas' supporters, including Republican senators on the Judiciary Committee. The Senate appointed special counsel Peter E. Fleming Jr. to investigate the leak. Totenberg and Newsdays Timothy Phelps were subpoenaed by Fleming but refused to answer questions about their confidential sources. Totenberg was confronted by one Thomas supporter, Republican Senator Alan K. Simpson, during and after the taping of an episode of Nightline. On the show, Simpson criticized Totenberg, saying, "What politicians get tired of is bias in reporters. Let's not pretend your reporting is objective here. That would be absurd." After Totenberg defended her reporting and objectivity on the show, Simpson followed her out of the studio and continued to criticize her, even holding open the door of her limousine so she could not leave. "He was in a complete rage. He was out of control," Totenberg said. Some observers connected Hunt's rehashing of a then nearly 20 year old incident to the stance of the Journal, whose conservative editorial pages had "editorially championed" Thomas and had previously criticized Totenberg,

She earned the Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists for investigative reporting.

Totenberg has made friends with several politicians and lawyers in national politics, and her personal connections have generated criticism. In 2000, journalists expressed concern that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's officiating at Totenberg's wedding could be seen as a conflict of interest. Totenberg did not consider it a conflict of interest since her friendship with Ginsberg was established before Ginsburg was nominated to the Supreme Court. The deeply personal nature of their friendship was not widely known to NPR audiences until Totenberg released the obituary. Subsequently, Totenberg received criticism for not disclosing the friendship. NPR's Public editor called Totenberg's undisclosed friendship with Ginsburg a conflict of interest (given Totenberg's role as Legal Affairs correspondent) that implies "one set of standards for senior, elite journalists, and another set of standards for the rest of the staff". Likewise, Totenberg revealed a long friendship with Justice Antonin Scalia after he died in 2016, and she has persistently worked to develop tight friendships with other justices and elite lawyers. Totenberg was also criticized for hugging her friend Lani Guinier during a press conference announcing Guinier's nomination by Bill Clinton to the post of Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. Early in her career, there were allegations that Totenberg obtained her scoops by untoward means, a fact Bill Kovach, editor of The New York Times, attributed to sexism.

The Wall Street Journal editorialist Paul Gigot wrote in 1991 that Totenberg exhibits partisanship in her reporting. Washington Post reporter Thomas Edsall said in 1995 that she was cited as an example of liberal bias in public broadcasting due to her reporting on two controversial Supreme Court nominations.

In 1995, responding to conservative Senator Jesse Helms (R N. C.), who characterized AIDS as a "disease transmitted by people deliberately engaging in unnatural acts" in his effort to cut government spending to combat it, Totenberg said: "I think he ought to be worried about what's going on in the good Lord's mind, because if there's retributive justice, he'll get AIDS from a transfusion or one of his grandchildren will." On the same show, conservative columnists Charles Krauthammer and Tony Snow also criticized Helms, with Krauthammer calling Helms's remarks "bigoted and cruel" and Snow accusing him of "hypocrisy".

In January 2022, Totenberg received criticism for reporting on the impact of COVID 19 pandemic related to mask wearing at the Supreme Court. On January 18, 2022, an article by Totenberg claimed that Chief Justice John Roberts "in some form" asked that the justices wear masks during oral arguments, partially due to Justice Sonia Sotomayor's diabetes related health concerns. Totenberg reported that Justice Neil Gorsuch (the Justice who sits next to Sotomayor on the bench) was the only Justice who refused to wear a mask, forcing Justice Sotomayor to join oral arguments virtually despite the other eight justices hearing oral arguments in person. A day after Totenberg's piece, Justices Gorsuch and Sotomayor issued a rare joint statement stating that Totenberg's story "surprised us" and Chief Justice Roberts issued a statement denying he had asked any Justices to wear a mask. Totenberg stood by her claim, citing that she did not know exactly how the Chief Justice asked the other justices to mask up, but he did suggest "in some form" that they should wear masks. In response, NPR's public editor called for Totenberg to issue a clarification, saying that Totenberg should have been more careful in her choice of the word "asked", and that other words would have better described to the audience the subtlety with which executive messages are conveyed in the Supreme Court. The original article by Totenberg was updated on January 22 to reflect the clarification.

Totenberg is the widow of U. S. Senator Floyd Haskell (D Colorado), who she married in 1979. In 2000, she married H. David Reines, a trauma surgeon and vice chairman of surgery at Inova Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church, Virginia; U. S. Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg presided over the wedding. On their honeymoon, he treated her for severe injuries after she was struck by a boat propeller while swimming. In March 2010, Totenberg's sister Amy Totenberg was nominated by President Barack Obama to the U. S. District Court in Atlanta. Amy Totenberg was confirmed the next year. Another sister, Jill Totenberg, is a businesswoman married to Brian Foreman. On August 6, 2015, the Ames Stradivarius violin, which had been stolen from her father in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 35 years earlier, in 1980, was recovered by the FBI after a woman sought an appraisal for it in New York City. According to The Times of Israel, the violin was made in Italy in 1734 "and is one of roughly 550 Stradivarius instruments known to exist. They can fetch millions of dollars at auction, including a record $15.9 million in 2011."