Is Legend of Broadcast honoree Nina Totenberg ready to retire? "Fuhgetaboutit!" 

Nina Totenberg wanted to make something clear when the National Press Club honored her as a "Legend of Broadcast" at a dinner Wednesday. 

"When you're honored as a legend, you — I hope you all know what that means: It means you'e old," said Totenberg, National Public Radio's legal affairs correspondent, who is 81. "Now having said that, I should say that I've been honored as a legend lots of times in the last decade or so, but I'm still not retiring. So if you were hoping for such an announcement — fuhgetaboutit!" 

The award from the Press Club's Broadcast and Podcast Team is indeed one of many such honors over several decades, notably for Totenberg's groundbreaking work on sexual harassment allegations that scrambled Justice Clarence Thomas's confirmation hearings in 1991 and many other Supreme Court scoops. She covered the court's Roe v. Wade 1973 decision legalizing abortion — and its overturn a half-century later.

She is known as one of the NPR's "founding mothers" along with Susan Stamberg, Linda Wertheimer and the late Cokie Roberts — women hired in NPR'S early days because, Totenberg said, men would not work for the low salaries paid to the women. 

Totenberg recalled the National Press Club's own limitations, when only men could be members and female reporters covering events at the club were barred from the main floor and thus were known as "the girls in the balcony." (That barrier was broken in 1971.) 

Totenberg turned to the present day. 

"Two things have me very worried, I confess," she said. "One is the seemingly inexorable disappearance of local newspapers and local TV news that is more than 'If it bleeds, it leads.' Without serious local journalism, people don't know what's happening and they can't be expected to hold officeholders accountable. 

"The other thing that worries me is the Trump administration's efforts to silence news outlets it disagrees with, starting with NPR and ending with big TV networks. This administration is hardly the only one to complain about coverage, but it's the first to try to actually silence news organizations since the Nixon administration."

Her final concern: "With the growth of social media, I, like many of you, am worried not just about misinformation and disinformation. I'm worried about how little people actually know."