Nina Totenberg

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Nina Totenberg bigraphy, stories - American political journalist

Nina Totenberg : biography

14 January 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 newsmagazines All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and Weekend Edition. She is also a panelist on the syndicated TV political commentary show Inside Washington.

Newsweek Magazine calls her "the creme de la creme" of NPR, and Vanity Fair refers to her as "Queen of the Leaks". She has won many broadcast journalism awards for both her explanatory pieces and her scoops.

Among her scoops was her groundbreaking report of sexual harassment allegations made against Clarence Thomas by University of Oklahoma law professor Anita Hill, leading the Senate Judiciary Committee to re-open Thomas’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Previously, in 1986, she broke the story that Supreme Court nominee Douglas H. Ginsburg had smoked marijuana, leading Ginsburg to withdraw his name. And in 1977, she reported on secret Supreme Court deliberations relating to the Watergate scandal.

Early career

Totenberg enrolled in Boston University in 1962, majoring in journalism, but dropped out less than three years later because, in her own words, she "wasn’t doing brilliantly". Soon after dropping out of college, Totenberg began her journalism career at the Boston Record American, where she worked on the Women’s Page and learned breaking news journalism skills by volunteering in the news department."Nina Totenberg", Current Biography Yearbook, 1996, pages 575–579. She moved on to the Peabody Times in 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 was nominated.

After Totenberg wrote an Observer profile of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, the latter wrote a long letter to the paper’s editor demanding she be fired. Instead, the editor printed the letter in the Observer along with a rebuttal of Hoover’s complaints regarding the article.

She was fired from that paper for plagiarism in 1972 regarding a profile she wrote of then-soon-to-be Speaker Tip O’Neill which included, without attribution, quotes from members of Congress that had previously appeared in The Washington Post. Totenberg has said that the dismissal also related to her rebuffing of sexual overtures from an editor. She has not identified the editor. Such plagiarism has been called "one of the cardinal sins of journalism from which reporters can never recover their credibility" Many of Totenberg’s colleagues have defended her, noting that this was a case of using previously reported quotes, a common journalistic practice in the 1970s. In 1995, Totenberg told the Columbia Journalism Review, "I have a strong feeling that a young reporter is entitled to one mistake and to have the holy bejeezus scared out of her to never do it again."Trudy Lieberman, , Columbia Journalism Review, July/August 1995.

She next worked for the New York 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."Nina Totenberg". Newsmakers 1992, Issue Cumulation. Gale Research, 1992. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale, 2009.

National Public Radio

In 1975, Nina Totenberg was hired by Bob Zelnick to work at National Public Radio and has been there since.

Watergate appeals