NPR retracts story reporting Justice Alito is retiring from Supreme Court

NPR published, then retracted, a story on Tuesday that said the Supreme Court had announced Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. was retiring.

The story briefly appeared on NPR’s homepage Tuesday morning, minutes after the Supreme Court issued several major rulings on its final day of the 2025-26 term.

The story was taken down minutes later and replaced with an editor’s note that said it had been “erroneously published.”

“NPR’s story on Justice Alito is inaccurate and any report they had a court statement was inaccurate,” Supreme Court spokeswoman Patricia McCabe told reporters.

In a statement Tuesday, NPR editor in chief Thomas Evans said the story was published “due to a misunderstanding” and that the network retracted the story as soon as the error was realized.

“We regret the error and any confusion this may have caused,” Evans said.

Evans added that Nina Totenberg, NPR’s longtime Supreme Court and legal affairs correspondent, would appear on NPR’s “All Things Considered” Tuesday afternoon to explain what happened, and that she had reached out to Alito to apologize.

It is not unusual for news outlets to have pre-written stories to be able to publish immediately upon the death or retirement of prominent officials. Alito, 76, the second-oldest sitting justice, was briefly hospitalized in March after feeling ill at a Federalist Society dinner in Philadelphia.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld birthright citizenship, keeping in place a legal principle - that almost everyone born on U.S. soil is a citizen - that has defined who is considered American for more than 150 years.

The Supreme Court also ruled that states can bar transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports and agreed to lift limits on how much political parties can spend in cooperation with candidates.