National Public Radio abruptly withdrew a story falsely claiming that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito had announced his retirement, a significant error involving one of the Courts most consequential conservative voices.
According to Breitbart, the original NPR piece ran under the headline, Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, retires, and portrayed Alito as a central architect of the Courts conservative jurisprudence on abortion and other hot-button issues. NPR later scrubbed the article and replaced it with an editors note titled, Editors note: NPR retracts story.
The networks correction stated: Earlier today we erroneously published a story saying that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was retiring. He has not announced his retirement and we have retracted the story. The retraction offered no explanation for how such a consequential mistake cleared NPRs editorial process or whether the piece had been drafted in advance of any actual announcement.
The timing of the blunder coincided with a pivotal day at the Supreme Court, as the justices prepared to release the final, closely watched opinions of the October 2025 term. Among the major rulings issued Tuesday was a 6-3 decision striking down President Donald Trumps birthright citizenship executive order, with the 194-page opinion concluding that the order violated the 14th Amendment.
In another 6-3 decision, the Court rejected the argument that federal law compels schools to force girls to accept boys on their sports teams. The majority held that the word sex in Title IX, the Javits Amendment, and related regulations could not plausibly be interpreted to mean anything other than biological sex, reinforcing a biological definition that runs counter to the lefts gender ideology and underscoring the ongoing importance of justices like Alito to the Courts conservative bloc.
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