My new essay, now posted at The Hill, addresses Nina Totenberg’s unacknowledged conflict of interest in covering the Supreme Court, as revealed in her new memoir Dinners with Ruth.
Here is the gist:
Nina Totenberg’s conflict of interest
by Steven Lubet, Opinion Contributor – 09/21/22 10:30 AM ET
Nina Totenberg’s new memoir, “Dinners with Ruth: A Memoir on the Power of Friendships,” is the beautifully touching story of an enduring friendship between two exceptional women. Ruth, of course, is the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose relationship with National Public Radio (NPR) reporter Totenberg began in 1971, long before either woman achieved national prominence. It continued, often over dinner, until Ginsburg’s death in 2020. The barely acknowledged subtext in the book is a conflict of interest between Totenberg’s obligations as a reporter and devotion to her friend.
It was the sort of relationship that objective journalists do not maintain with the subjects of their reporting, but Totenberg shrugs it off.
In the summer before the 2016 presidential election, Ginsburg made several disparaging statements about then-candidate Donald Trump, calling him a “faker” and suggesting that she would move to New Zealand if he were elected.
Totenberg was scheduled to interview Ginsburg a few days later. Following her “usual practice,” she told the justice that “I was going to ask her about what she had said.”
Ginsburg was dismayed. “Oh, please don’t do that,” she asked. Totenberg held firm. “That’s my job,” she explained.
Totenberg did not raise the ethics issue, suggesting instead that the justice had merely “goofed.” Even that was too much for Ginsburg. “It’s over and done with, and I don’t want to discuss it anymore.”
Totenberg accepted the stonewalling. The obvious next question – to anyone not tiptoeing around a friend’s embarrassment – was whether Ginsburg would recuse herself from cases challenging the election. That would have put Ginsburg on the spot – and any answer would have been extremely meaningful in light of later events – but Totenberg let it drop.
As a decades-long NPR listener, I have always been an admirer of Totenberg’s work. But after reading “Dinners with Ruth,” l wonder which secrets were kept, which questions went unasked and what stories a more objective journalist might have reported.
You can read the entire essay at The Hill, including additional details of Totenberg’s favorable reporting (and comparisons to Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas).