Reporter Takes Heat on Ginsburg : Totenberg Says She Used Marijuana Once

Yes, the National Public Radio reporter who blew the whistle on ex-Supreme Court nominee Douglas Ginsburg’s pot-smoking took a toke once.

“I have never smoked marijuana except for once when I took a puff in my room,” said Nina Totenberg, NPR’s legal affairs reporter.

But, unlike Sens. Albert Gore (D-Tenn.), former Arizona Gov. Bruce Babbitt or any of the rest of the parade of public officials who have confessed to inhaling cannabis in their youth, Totenberg doesn’t particularly regret it. It was something she tried, didn’t like and didn’t try again, she says.

Since Ginsburg announced the withdrawal of his nomination last Saturday, Totenberg has been fielding calls from media critics all over the country who have questioned the validity of her Ginsburg revelations. Their voices have ranged from bemused to angry, according to Totenberg.

In the wake of all the reaction, she thinks journalistic pundits on both the right and left are missing the point of her disclosure.

“Many of these people (like Gore and Babbitt) were very young when they did it, but Doug Ginsburg was using pot when he was a law teacher at Harvard. He was breaking the law while he was teaching it,” she said.

From conservatives to liberals, columnists and commentators have been pointing to the Ginsburg affair this past week as journalistic moralism run amok--the ultimate in what some call the media’s neo-Puritanism that began with the reporting of former Sen. Gary Hart’s alleged adultery, moved on to Sen. Joseph Biden’s (D-Del.) plagiarism and wound up in televangelist Pat Robertson’s bedroom. The Republican candidate’s wife was pregnant with the couple’s first child before their marriage.

“I think it is really foolish breast-beating or self-flagellation,” she said. “We (NPR) treated it (the Ginsburg revelation) with great sensitivity when we reported it. There are, after all, a great number of people in his generation who used marijuana.

“It was his own supporters, though, who treated the news as killing information, not me. What am I supposed to do? I’m not a fencer.”

She’s had her share of support, however, ranging from tongue-in-cheek columnist Russell Baker to CBS reporter and commentator Susan Spencer.

The most outraged calls, she pointed out with some irony, were from critics who told her they write for liberal journals.

“They asked if I didn’t think I’d gone too far,” she said. “I’m not trying to be extremely virtuous, but his views at Harvard were the major part of his adult life. He has done only two things since he graduated (from law school): teach and work in the Justice Department.”

Along with his pot-smoking, the 41-year-old federal appellate judge was reported to have run a computer dating service in college and to have prepared the government’s position on a case involving cable TV at the same time that he had a $140,000 investment in a cable-TV company. His wife, a physician, performed abortions while a medical student in obstetric training.

NPR News Director Adam C. Powell III said that the only overriding concern about broadcasting the Ginsburg marijuana story was accuracy. He said that airing the story was a group decision involving himself, Washington senior producer Anne Edwards, acting “All Things Considered” producer Art Silverman, Totenberg and himself.

Powell said that Totenberg had six on-the-record interviews confirming Ginsburg’s marijuana use and that she had tried getting Administration reaction to the story repeatedly before it was to air. Ultimately, he said, the Justice Department did issue statements but only moments before the story was to go on the air.

“Nina had to completely restructure the entire story,” Powell said. “You should have heard her talking to them in Justice (Department). She had to say ‘NPR. No. No. No. Not NBC. NPR! National Public Radio.”

Totenberg dwelled on Ginsburg’s appellate application and the marijuana issue, she said, because they were the issues that dealt specifically with the law and Ginsburg’s character. She didn’t even get around to checking up on his college dating service which she found less relevant to his nomination than the other issues.

Still, she said, the dating service information was as valid as his marijuana use. She also cited as valid the much-ballyhooed reporting of ex-Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork’s video rental record was valid. A reporter for a Washington weekly got the Bork record from a local rental outlet and printed the list, which included such titles as “Pretty in Pink” and “The Private Life of Henry VIII,” but no X-rated films.

“It was interesting,” Totenberg said.

NPR’s Scott Simon, who hosts “Weekend Edition” on Saturday mornings, interviewed the reporter who published Bork’s video rental list and quizzed him on whether he felt he had violated Bork’s privacy. The following week, Simon apologized to his audience for having the reporter on the air and, on the floor of Congress, Rep. Al McCallum, (R-Calif.) introduced a bill that would make revelation of a video rental customer’s rental record illegal.

Totenberg would not comment on Simon’s apology, but did say that she believed his interview of the reporter was valid.

“Where are you going to draw the line?” she asked rhetorically. “Let’s look at some other examples. If someone’s a wife beater, a shop lifter, an embezzler or misused his brother’s estate . . . almost anything at all . . ., you’re going to find somebody who will think that it is private information and others who will not,” she said.

The most extreme example she cites is John Fedders, a Reagan appointee who was fired from his post as director of enforcement for the Securities and Exchange Commission on Feb. 26, 1985, after it was revealed during his divorce that he had beaten his wife.

“I remember going to all kinds of dinner parties where men in three-piece suits would say that the fact that he was a wife beater was private information and that it should not have been reported,” she said. “His wife wrote a book about her life and you know what? A judge recently ordered her to share her royalties with him.”

According to Totenberg, all of it deserved to be reported just as much as Ginsburg’s marijuana use.