From Howard Kurtz’s column today:
Linda Greenhouse, the New York Times’ Supreme Court reporter for three decades, has no shortage of opinions.
She aired some of them in June when she was honored at Harvard, saying that “our government had turned its energy and attention away from upholding the rule of law and toward creating law-free zones at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Haditha and other places around the world. And let’s not forget the sustained assault on women’s reproductive freedom and the hijacking of public policy by religious fundamentalism.”
Don’t those remarks, publicized last week by National Public Radio, go too far for a beat reporter covering such issues at the high court? Greenhouse says her comments were “statements of fact,” not opinion, as underscored by the court striking down the administration’s policy of holding terror suspects without charges.
“The notion that someone cannot go and speak from the heart to a group of college classmates and fellow alums, without being accountable to self-appointed media watchdogs, means American journalism is in danger of strangling in its own sanctimony,” Greenhouse says.
Tom Kunkel, dean of the University of Maryland’s journalism school, calls Greenhouse’s remarks “ill-advised,” saying that while she can “still report objectively on contentious issues before the Supreme Court, the average person can reasonably ask, how can that not color her stories?” But former Times ombudsman Daniel Okrent says it is impossible “to find any trace of her views in her work.”