Dinners With Ruth

As an NPR journalist with a decades-long career, Nina Totenberg is a well-known figure in the American press. The NPR audience follows her stories on NPR radio programs such as All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and Weekend Edition. Having covered legal affairs, and in particular Supreme Court cases, since the 1970s, Totenberg draws on her wealth of legal knowledge, as well as personal observations and anecdotes, in Dinners with Ruth. Many of these anecdotes center around her close friendships with Supreme Court Justices, including Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Antonin Scalia, William Brennan, and Lewis F. Powell, Jr. While these close relationships make for interesting stories, they also raise the question of bias in Totenberg’s reporting, since it is unusual, and generally considered unprofessional, for journalists to be close friends with those who they are tasked with reporting on.

In her book, Totenberg frequently downplays the potentially problematic nature of her friendships with the Supreme Court Justices by insisting that they never broke the Court’s confidentiality about upcoming decisions, thus keeping their professional lives separate from their private socializing with Totenberg. The author explains that she and her husband never encouraged Justices to violate that confidentiality, writing, “We were always very firm on ground rules with guests; nothing about current cases before the Court” (184).