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This week, veteran National Public Radio reporter Nina Totenberg briefly published a story stating that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was retiring. This report was wrong, and within minutes, NPR retracted the story. What followed was a day of public self-flagellation from Totenberg, her editor, and NPR itself, followed by a Cersei Lannister walk of shame–level pile-on from everyone else. Was this a significant journalistic blunder? For sure, as Totenberg was the first to admit in her public interview and apology to the justice.

But was it an egregious, personal error, akin to Totenberg stealing into Alito’s hotel room and absconding with an internal organ, as it has been widely treated? We don’t think so. Indeed, what has been grievously missed in the melee is that this is not really a press story at all—it is a story about court transparency and hubris. This mistake reveals an institution that has repeatedly and systemically sidestepped public accountability by making itself impossible to cover by human reporters and, in so doing, has made itself vastly harder to understand by the very public it is meant to serve.

For decades, the justices have deliberately shielded themselves from public scrutiny, erecting—or refusing to dismantle—bafflingly unnecessary obstacles that stand between their imperial proclamations and the public who must live under their dictates. Conveniently, this muddled and outdated system also lets the justices spend the last two weeks of every June blitzing the public with hundreds of pages of esoteric and dense opinions—opinions that may take away treasured and deeply enshrined constitutional rights. Oh, and any mistaken understandings about what they just said? Well, that’s totally not on them. Unerringly, they blame a sloppy and careless press or an ignorant public for failing to understand. Then they brush off their hands and walk away, leaving the fires to burn behind them.

Let’s back up a moment to paint a picture of what decision days look like at 1 First St. Each year, the court chooses to hand down the bulk of its biggest, most complex, and most controversial decisions during the last weeks of its term. It also chooses to........

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