Over in Politico, Michael Schaffer reads Dinners With Ruth, NPR reporter Nina Totenberg’s memoir of her four-decades-long friendship with the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and asks whether Totenberg was keeping a secret that could have changed history:
Maybe she could have broadcast just the things that would have been clear to a dispassionate observer, albeit hard for a devoted friend to accept: that Ginsburg was a desperately sick woman, that her family and friends were engaged in what amounted to an unacknowledged death watch — a report that would have lent flesh-and-blood immediacy to the bland statements from the court’s press office. . . .
There’s a chance that a blunt story about Ginsburg’s decline might have changed the trajectory that led to the end of Americans’ right to abortion. As competitors’ sensationalist stories focused on Ginsburg’s health, activists might have gotten GOP senators (many of them locked in tight elections) on the record promising to not fill the seat until after the voters had a say in the November presidential election. The lurid coverage would surely have undercut the element of surprise that enabled Mitch McConnell to move almost immediately to muscle through a replacement.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg began the year 2020 aged 86, and everyone knew her history of cancer, chemotherapy, radiation, multiple surgeries, artery stent, and multiple falls. Her death should have been unsurprising.
GOP senators were not going to go on the record promising to not fill the seat until after the voters had had a say in the November presidential election. They would have effectively been telling their conservative supporters, “There’s really not much reason to vote for me.” The Constitution put no restrictions upon when a president could nominate a justice, or when the Senate could vote to confirm or reject that justice.
When Ginsburg passed away on September 18, 2020, Republicans knew they had the chance to establish a solid majority of Supreme Court justices who saw the Constitution and the law the way they did. Nothing was going to stop them; there was nothing the media, Senate Democrats, or liberal activists could have done to change that. Amy Coney Barrett is not on the Supreme Court because Mitch McConnell had the “element of surprise” or because the Left didn’t try hard enough to prevent her confirmation.
Schaffer is on more solid ground when he points out how Totenberg’s indisputably warm and genuine friendship with Ginsburg complicated how fairly she could cover the Supreme Court:
If Totenberg were an architect or a history professor or an airline pilot or an actuary, the emotional blind spots would be her business. But she’s a reporter, a very influential one. Which means that those of us who have relied on her reporting but didn’t experience the heartwarming calls or the gossip-filled evenings are within our rights to apply a certain selfish cost-benefit analysis: What exactly do we get out of her friendships? Totenberg says that intimacy with justices and public officials made her a more thoughtful reporter and a better person. I’ll buy it. Yet even if you don’t think any amount of scary Ginsburg-health reporting could have deterred Mitch McConnell in 2020, it’s hard to come away from this book and not think the bonds also cost her something — and us, too.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with a reporter’s being friends with a source. (Friends suggest story ideas all the time!) But once a story involves a friend, that reporter should bend over backwards to make sure the friendship isn’t skewing how he perceives the matter. Maybe your friend’s version of events isn’t quite reliable, or displays that friend’s own actions under the best possible light. This is when a reporter should be most careful.
And if your beat is the Supreme Court, just about every story you write or report on will involve the justice who is your friend. Kelly McBride, chair of the Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership at the Poynter Institute, wrote in NPR in September 2020 that the public radio network should have disclosed Totenberg’s friendship with RBG much sooner. That rebuke was moot after the justice passed.