National Public Radio (NPR) is refusing to correct a story that was challenged by a trio of Supreme Court justices, triggering a flood of criticism.
Citing anonymous sources, reporter Nina Totenberg said Chief Justice John Roberts "asked the other justices to mask up," or wear masks, because Justice Sonia Sotomayor expressed concerns for her safety amid the recent surge in COVID-19 cases.
Totenberg said that because Justice Neil Gorsuch refused the request—Gorsuch has not worn a mask on the bench recently—Sotomayor began attending oral arguments from her chambers.
Sotomayor and Gorsuch said Sotomayor did not ask Gorsuch to wear a mask, adding that "while we may sometimes disagree about the law, we are warm colleagues and friends."
Even worse for NPR, which is partially funded by taxpayer money, Roberts said separately that “I did not request Justice Gorsuch or any other Justice to wear a mask on the bench.”
Despite the direct challenges to the story, though, NPR has not issued a correction.
Ask and requests are synonyms that mean essentially the same thing.
An NPR spokesman told The Epoch Times via email that the outlet "continues to stand by Nina Totenberg’s reporting."
Jeffrey McCall, a communications professor at DePauw University, said that the decision not to correct the story means NPR is calling the justices liars, "which, frankly, comes off as unseemly."
"The justices have made a public statement and, if NPR wants to dispute it, they need to do more to provide context and even identify their source. The general public knows NPR is a largely agenda-driven news outlet, and they will lose in a credibility contest with Supreme Court justices," he added.
The NPR spokesman and Totenberg declined to answer or did not respond to several sets of questions, including whether any other NPR employees verified the sources cited by Totenberg, who was fired from the National Observer for plagiarism.
While Totenberg said Roberts "asked" other justices to wear masks in her story, during an appearance on NPR's "All Things Considered," prior to the justices' statements, she said Roberts "suggested" that the other justices don face coverings.
NPR's public editor, Kelly McBride, said that the different descriptions mean the story "merits a clarification, but not a correction."
The reporter told McBride that she did not know how Roberts allegedly conveyed what she claimed he did.
"In the absence of a clarification, NPR risks losing credibility with audience members who see the plainly worded statement from Roberts and are forced to go back to NPR's story and reconcile the nuances of the verb 'asked' when in fact, it's not a nuanced word," McBride said.
Readers and listeners have apparently contacted the outlet expressing concern over what happened.
"In order for the story to be true as NPR first reported, Roberts would've had to have asked 'in some form,' but he said he didn't, full stop," one said.
Joe Concha, a media critic at The Hill, wrote on Twitter that "NPR couldn’t have handled this any worse," linking to McBride's piece.
Totenberg later spoke to the Daily Beast, criticizing McBride for the column.
Responding to Justice Roberts' direct challenge to her reporting, she claimed that "I did not say that he requested that people do anything, but 'in some form' did.”