Nina Totenberg (born January 14, 1944) is an American legal affairs correspondent for National Public Radio (NPR). 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.

Background and education

Totenberg was born in New York, the daughter of violinist Roman Totenberg and Melanie Totenberg, who was executive vice president of the Massachusetts chapter of the liberal Americans for Democratic Action.
She 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.”

Early career

Soon after dropping out of college, Totenberg began her journalism career at the Boston Record American, where she worked on recipes and wedding announcements and learned journalism skills by volunteering in the news department."Nina Totenberg", Current Biography Yearbook, 1996, pages 575-9. 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 because "no one else was doing it". She began her long friendship with future Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg when she called Ginsburg, then a Rutgers University professor, with a question about the Fourteenth Amendment. 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 were 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.
Totenberg has charged that she was the victim of sexual harrassment at the Observer. She said "I had a boss who made passes at me repeatedly," but has not named that person.

She was fired from that paper for plagiarism 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. Such plagiarism has been called "one of the cardinal sins of journalism from which reporters can never recover their credibility", but other reporters have defended her, saying the practice of using quotes in this manner was common journalistic practice in the 1970s.Ann Louise Bardach, "Nina Totenberg: Queen of the Leaks", Vanity Fair, January 1992, pages 46-57 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."

She next worked for the Washington DC news magazine New Times. At that publication, wrote a notorious 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 attempt to rebut allegations regarding his stupidity.Nina Totenberg." Newsmakers 1992, Issue Cumulation. Gale Research, 1992. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale, 2009.
In the 1990s she was a regular contributor to ABC's Nightline.

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

In 1977, Totenberg broke a story about the Supreme Court appeal of three men who had been convicted in the Watergate scandal: H.R. Haldeman, John Mitchell, and John D. Ehrlichman. Totenberg revealed the results of their secret 5-3 vote against reviewing the case and that the three dissenters were appointees of President Richard Nixon, who resigned in the wake of Watergate. Totenberg also revealed that Nixon-appointed Chief Justice Warren Burger delayed announcing the results of the vote hoping to sway his fellow justices.

Douglas Ginsburg's Supreme Court nomination

Totenberg broke the story that Douglas H. Ginsburg, who had been nominated to the Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan, had smoked marijuana "on a few occasions" during his student days in the 1960s and while an Assistant Professor in the 1970s, something that didn't appear in Ginsburg's FBI background check. The revelations resulted in Ginsburg's withdrawing his name from consideration. Totenberg was awarded the 1988 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton award for outstanding broadcast journalism for the story.
Totenberg was accused of using material without proper attribution by several staffers at the Legal Times, who claim she did so when one of her stories on Ginsburg "bore an alarming resemblance to what I [Aaron Freiwald] had just given her." Totenberg said she had been working on the story for days before she had access to the Legal Times material and had already discovered the same information.

Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings

In 1991, a few days before a confirmation vote was scheduled for Republican George H. W. Bush's Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, Totenberg received a leak of confidential documents that included allegations of sexual harassment lodged against Thomas by University of Oklahoma law professor Anita Hill. Totenberg's report about Hill's allegations led the Senate Judiciary Committee to re-open Thomas's Supreme Court confirmation hearings to consider Hill's charges.

Criticism came from many Thomas supportersJ. Elson and S.S. Gregory, "When Reporters Make News", Time, October 28, 1991, Vol. 138 Issue 17, p30, including Republican senators on the Judiciary Committee, who appointed special counsel Peter E. Fleming Jr.. Totenberg and another reporter, Newsday's Timothy Phelps, were subpoenaed by Fleming but refused to answer questions about their confidential sources. Totenberg even had a confrontation with one committee senator, Republican Alan K. Simpson, during and after the taping of an episode of Nightline. On the show, Simpson criticized Totenberg, saying "What politicians get tired of is bias in reporters. Let's not pretend your reporting is objective here. That would be absurd." Totenberg defended her reporting and objectivity on the show and Simpson followed her out of the studio to continue to criticize her, even holding open the door of her limousine so she couldn't leave. "He was in a complete rage. He was out of control," Totenberg said. Accounts differ on exactly how she responded to this, but she used what she called "choice epithets" and said "I think I told him to shut the fuck up."
Following Totenberg's allegation to the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz that she had been sexually harassed at the National Observer, Al Hunt of the Wall Street Journal brought up the plagiarism incident in a column about media coverage of and responses to the Thomas hearings. Some observers connected Hunt's rehashing of a then nearly 20-year-old incident to the stance of the Journal, whose conservative editorial pages had "editorially championed" Thomas and had previously criticized Totenberg, but Hunt denied any ideological motivation.
For the report and NPR's gavel-to-gavel coverage, Totenberg received the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award. The same year she won the George Polk Award for excellence in journalism and the Joan S. Barone Award for excellence in Washington-based national affairs/public policy reporting (the latter also in part for her coverage of the retirement of Justice Thurgood Marshall). The American Library Association presented her with their James Madison Award, given to those who "championed, protected, and promoted public access to government information and the public’s right to know". She also earned the Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists for investigative reporting.

Personal life

Totenberg is the widow of the late Democratic Sen. Floyd Haskell (Colo), whom she married in 1979. She remarried in 2000 to Dr. H. David Reines, a trauma surgeon and vice chairman of surgery at Inova Fairfax Hospital. On their honeymoon, he treated her for severe injuries after she was hit by a boat propeller while swimming.

Awards

In addition to the awards mentioned above, and among her other awards, Totenberg won the Columbia University Dupont Award in 1988 for her coverage of the Supreme Court nominations. She has been honored seven times by the American Bar Association for excellence in legal reporting. She also won the first-ever Toni House award presented by the American Judicature Society for a career body of work and was the first radio journalist to be honored by the National Press Foundation as Broadcaster of the Year.

Merchandise

Totenberg's image has also been used for NPR's tongue-in-cheek pledge-drive gift: The Nina Totin' Bag. It is a play on the stereotypical pledge-drive tote-bag so often referred to by those who lampoon public media and the name of NPR's Legal Affairs correspondent.

Other

Totenberg has written articles for the Harvard Law Review; the New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine; the Christian Science Monitor; and numerous other legal and general circulation publications.
She contributed to the Jewish Women's Archive's online exhibit "Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution," a history of activism in liberal Jewish feminism.
She took on Cate Edwards as an intern after the latter finished her first year in Law School (summer of 2007); at the time, Cate's father John Edwards was running for the Democratic nomination for president.
Totenberg is mentioned in the Simpsons episode "Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy", wherein the Lisa Lionheart doll is imbued with "…the wisdom of Gertrude Stein and the wit of Cathy Guisewite, the tenacity of Nina Totenberg, and the common sense of Elizabeth Cady Stanton! And to top it off, the down-to-earth good looks of Eleanor Roosevelt."

She appeared briefly as herself in the Kevin Kline film, Dave.

Controversies and controversial quotes

The Wall Street Journal editorial pages reported that Totenberg said that the American Bar Association gave Clarence Thomas a "qualified" rating "because he was black, and because the bar did not want to give an unqualified rating" to a black person.
On the July 8, 1995, episode of Inside Washington, the panel discussed comments by Republican Senator Jesse Helms advocating reducing funding for AIDS research because it was "a disease transmitted by people deliberately engaging in unnatural acts." Totenberg commented "I think [Helms] ought to be worried about the -- about what's going on in the good Lord's mind because if there's retributive justice, he'll get AIDS from a transfusion or one of his grandchildren will get it." Totenberg's comments were criticized by Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby.
During an exchange on Inside Washington on October 10, 2003, Totenberg said of General William Boykin, an official in George W. Bush's administration: "I hope he's not long for this world..." After a rebuke, Totenberg corrected herself: "No, no. I mean, in his job. In his job, in his job, please, in his job."See transcript at
NPR's Omsbudsman concluded that it was clear that Totenberg was referring to the General's position, not his life.

Accusations of bias, misrepresentation, and conflict of interest

Totenberg has been criticized of bias in her reporting. In addition to the exchange with Senator Simpson described above, syndicated columnist L. Brent Bozell III and writer Tim Graham, in a National Review blog, said her interest in the allegations of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas, and lack of interest in those against President Bill Clinton, were an example of bias against conservatives and Republicans. Another charge of bias came from Wall Street Journal editorialist Paul Gigot: "I think the thing that I would criticize Nina for is that she is simply a partisan."
Retired professor of constitutional law Don Kates accused Totenberg of misrepresentation in her reporting. She reported that there was no support in "America's law schools or its scholarly journals" for the position that the Second Amendment protects individual gun ownership. Kates stated that in fact, out of over 60 law review articles on the Second Amendment, "only a handful" did not support that view.

In his book on journalistc ethics,
Professor of Journalism Ron Smith states that some journalists criticized Totenberg for asking Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to officiate at Totenberg's marriage in 2000,
as this could be a conflict of interest. But Totenberg says "I have known Ruth Ginsburg long before she was on the Supreme Court...I do not consider it a conflict of interest."
During a press conference announcing the nomination by Bill Clinton of liberal civil rights attorney Lani Guinier to be Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, Totenberg hugged her friend Guinier. Guinier later wrote that this meeting was "used by several commentators to question her [Totenberg's] 'objectivity.'" Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz described the incident, and added "Totenberg dismissed suggestions that she might go easy on Guinier". Totenberg said that Guinier was a friend, but "not a close friend", that she hadn't seen in some time. She added "I have lots of friends. Part of being in this business is knowing lots of people."