Journalist Katie Couric discloses in a new book that she previously decided not to report the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s remarks regarding sportsmen kneeling during the national anthem in protest of racial injustice. According to the Daily Mail, Couric claims in her upcoming biography, “Going There,” that she withheld some of Ginsburg’s statements from a 2016 interview to “protect” the then-“elderly” justice.
Ginsburg, who died last year, was reported in a 2016 interview by Yahoo News as stating that NFL players who choose not to stand before games are “stupid and disrespectful.” The kneeling demonstrations, which were led by former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, were intended to draw attention to police brutality and systematic racism in the United States. What Couric left out of the Yahoo News interview was Ginsburg’s statement that athletes protesting in this manner were demonstrating “contempt for a government that has made it possible for their parents and grandparents to live a decent life… which they probably could not have lived in the places they came from.”
Couric claims in her book that she withheld the comments at the time because she “wanted to protect” Ginsburg, who was 83 at the time and “probably didn’t completely understand the issue.” Ginsburg then took back her statements, stating in a statement that she was “barely aware” of the protests or their “meaning,” that her words were “inappropriately dismissive and harsh,” and that she “should have declined to reply” days after the 2016 interview was released. Couric “has not been involved with Yahoo News for several years following her departure in July 2017,” Yahoo News claimed in a statement to The Washington Post in response to the disclosures.
