Nina Totenberg, who is known as the "Founding Mother" of NPR, falsely reported earlier this week that Justice Neil Gorsuch refused to wear a mask after Justice Sotomayor and Chief Justice Roberts both requested him to.
Sotomayor and Gorsuch issued a joint statement denying the NPR reporting.
Chief Justice John Roberts also issued a statement contradicting NPR's reporting:
I did not request Justice Gorsuch or any other Justice to wear a mask on the bench.
So, in light of all this evidence that Totenberg falsely reported this story, how do you think she responded?
Yep, she doubled down.
Who are we supposed to believe? Supreme Court of the United States Justices Sotomayor, Gorsuch, and Roberts, or... an NPR reporter?
Totenberg, on Wednesday, said that NPR stands by her reporting. Because of course, they do.
Don't let facts get in the way of a good hit job.
And now, days later, she is still defending her fake news. The very liberal Daily Beast published a piece Friday morning where Totenberg still claims flat out that she is correct, even though literally everyone involved denies the story.
From the Daily Beast:
The public editor, Kelly McBride, who operates independently of the newsroom but takes a paycheck from the publication, called for a "clarification, but not a correction" to an article about the Supreme Court written by one of the newsroom's "founding mothers," legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg.
"She can write any g****** thing she wants, whether or not I think it's true," Totenberg told The Daily Beast on Thursday night. "She's not clarifying anything!"
Totenberg laughed, and added: "I haven't even looked at it, and I don't care to look at it because I report to the news division, she does not report to the news division."
So, one person at NPR has at least a little bit of dignity left. Public editor Kelly McBride wanted, not to retract the story, but simply "clarify" it. She wasn't even wanting to pull the fake news, just change the wording to get away with it, but Totenberg would have none of that.
It would seem that half a century in an NPR newsroom does not make you a person of integrity.
McBride, NPR's public editor, then wrote: "After talking to Totenberg and reading all justices' statements, I believe her reporting was solid, but her word choice was misleading."
"Totenberg and her editors should have chosen a word other than ‘asked'... It's not a nuanced word." McBride wrote, in an article with the subtitle "An inaccurate verb choice made the reporting unclear." Unless "asked" was updated in the article to something like "suggested," a word Totenberg later used while discussing her story in an All Things Considered segment, McBride warned that "NPR risks losing credibility with audience members."
A spokesperson for NPR told The Daily Beast late Thursday that "we stand behind Nina Totenberg's reporting." The NPR official added: "The public editor is independent and does not speak for NPR."
McBride, for her part, told The Daily Beast on Thursday night that she stood by her recommendation, and that she does "think NPR should clarify the language in the story."
McBride is begging NPR: "Please, let me save a little bit of NPR's dignity. I'm not even going to say it was a lie. Just that she misspoke. PLEASE."
And Totenberg and the NPR news division are like, "nah".
What an absolute clown show.
This is how the story wraps up:
But in her own telephone conversation with The Daily Beast, Totenberg—a towering presence at NPR who has been there since 1975—responded to McBride, the justices, and general criticism of her story.
"A non-denial denial from two of them doesn't work," Totenberg said, referring to the statement from Sotomayor and Gorsuch. As to Roberts, she said, "the other just refuses to accept the fact that I did not say that he requested that people do anything, but in some form did."
"I have got nothing to say, except that I am sticking by my reporting," Totenberg said, while eating dinner. "I think it is absolutely valid."
How in the world are we supposed to take these people seriously?
Totenberg has been at NPR for nearly 50 years.
In the face of the truth, Totenberg is continuing to lie because she has too much pride and too much hatred for the Right.
This is National Public Radio!
We are signing this lady's paycheck.
And apparently neither she, nor the left-wing media, give a care for the truth.
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