NPR Publishes False Report Saying Justice Samuel Alito Retired

An inaccurate news story set off a furor Tuesday morning over the possibility that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito had retired.

NPR published the report just before 11 a.m. ET, declaring that Alito had announced the end of his 20-year career on the high court. But the story was quickly retracted and replaced by a note that the story had been “erroneously published.”

The publication’s editor-in-chief, Tommy Evans, said in a statement shortly after that the story had been published “due to a misunderstanding” by NPR’s Supreme Court and legal affairs correspondent, Nina Totenberg, a distinguished legal reporter who has covered the court for decades.

“Neither Justice Alito nor the Supreme Court Public Information Office has announced his retirement,” Evans said. “... We regret the error and any confusion this may have caused.”

Totenberg will address the error on NPR’s radio show “All Things Considered” on Tuesday afternoon and has reached out to Alito with an apology, Evans added.

The story was picked up by at least one other major outlet, Vox, which published its own piece falsely reporting Alito’s retirement on Tuesday morning. The digital news site also issued a retraction.

“Vox published a story mentioning Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s retirement based on inaccurate reporting from another outlet and has since retracted the story,” an editor’s note on the website read.

“What a nightmare for NPR,” Kelsey Dallas, the managing editor of SCOTUSblog, said on a live chat monitoring Supreme Court decisions Tuesday morning.

Chatter about Alito’s retirement has long circulated. Kalshi betters placed the odds of the 76-year-old justice retiring before Jan. 1, 2027, at about 45% before the NPR story was published Tuesday. Bets spiked for about an hour before returning to pre-publication levels after the story was retracted.