2022-10-01
29 分钟This is in conversation from Apple News.
I'm Shemitah Basu.
Today, NPR journalist Nina Totenberg talks about her career and the complex friendships that came with it.
Nina Totenberg has been covering the supreme court for about 50 years.
The first black member was Thurgood Marshall, who later was elevated to the Supreme Court.
She came up in journalism during a time when she was often the only woman in the room.
That's one of the core things she discovered she had in common with a lawyer named Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
They became friends long before Ginsburg was seated on the Supreme Court.
In her new book, Dinners with A Memoir on the Power of Friendships, Nina reflects on her relationships, her reporting career, and Ginsburg's legacy.
Nina has had other close friendships with Supreme Court justices, including Antonin Scalia, and she talks about them in the book.
In our conversation, I pressed her on the ethics of that, where and how she defines the line between friendship and sourcing and whether she can be a fair judge of that line.
There is no way that you can recuse yourself from a whole category of stories or a whole category of people.
You would have no career.
It doesn't work that way.
We started by talking about how Nina and the someday justice first met.
It was 1971.
Nina was reporting on a case before the Supreme Court, and she saw that the brief had been written by a law professor at Rutgers, a woman named Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
I was a newbie reporter covering the court in my early 20s, and I didn't understand the brief that she'd filed.
So I called and I got an hour long lecture and I could ask questions during the lecture.
It was a great lecture, but that's how I first met her.