Nina Totenberg
Nina Totenberg (born January 14, 1944) is National Public Radio's legal affairs correspondent. Her reports air regularly on NPR's newsmagazines All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and Weekend Edition. She attended Boston University, and is the daughter of violinist Roman Totenberg, who is professor emeritus at Boston University and also teaches at the Longy School of Music.
Before joining NPR in 1975, Totenberg served as Washington editor of New Times Magazine, and before that she was the legal affairs correspondent for the National Observer.
In 1991, her ground-breaking report about University of Oklahoma Law Professor Anita Hill's allegations of sexual harassment by Judge Clarence Thomas led the Senate Judiciary Committee to re-open Thomas's Supreme Court confirmation hearings to consider Hill's charges. NPR received the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award for its gavel-to-gavel coverage, anchored by Totenberg, of both the original hearings and the inquiry into Anita Hill's allegations, and for Totenberg's reports and exclusive interview with Hill.
Totenberg also received the George Polk Award for excellence in journalism and the Joan S. Baron 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). She has received many other awards, and been honored seven times by the American Bar Association for excellence in legal reporting.[1] She has also reported extensively on the career of Justice Harry Blackmun, particularly after his papers were opened by the Library of Congress.
Totenberg is the widow of the late former Sen. Floyd Haskell (D-Colo), whom she married in 1979. She married H. David Reines, a trauma physician, in 2000. On their honeymoon, he treated her for severe injuries after she was hit by a boat propeller while swimming.[2]
Albert Hunt article
During Totenberg's coverage of the Anita Hill hearings, Wall Street Journal columnist Albert Hunt accused Totenberg of not disclosing the true reason she left the National Observer newspaper. In his column, Hunt reported that in 1972 Totenberg copied verbatim quotations and sentences from a Washington Post profile of politician Tip O'Neill. 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." [3]
References
- ^ http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=2101289
- ^ http://www.eagletribune.com/news/stories/20001220/FP_004.htm Eagle-Tribune account of Totenberg's accident
- ^ http://www.salon.com/weekly/plagiarism960722.html
- NPR Biography. Retrieved Sep 6, 2005.
- Albert R. Hunt (October 17, 1991). "Tales of Ignominy, Beyond Thomas and Hill". Wall Street Journal.
- Trudy Lieberman (July/August 1995). "Plagiarize, Plagiarize, Plagiarize..." Columbia Journalism Review.
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