Linda Greenhouse (born January 9, 1947, New York City) is the Knight Distinguished Journalist in Residence and Joseph M. Goldstein Senior Fellow at Yale Law School. She was a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter who covered the United States Supreme Court for nearly three decades for The New York Times.
Greenhouse began her 40-year career at The New York Times covering state government in the paper's bureau in Albany. After completing her Master's degree on a Ford Foundation fellowship, she returned to the Times and covered 29 sessions of the Supreme Court from 1978 to 2007, with the exception of two years during the mid-1980s during which she covered the Congress. Since 1981, she has authored over 2,800 articles for The New York Times. She has been a regular guest on the PBS program Washington Week.
In 2008, Greenhouse accepted an offer from the Times for an early retirement at the end of the Supreme Court session in the summer of 2008. Seven of the nine sitting Justices attended a goodbye party for Greenhouse on June 12, 2008.
Awards and prizes
Greenhouse was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Journalism (Beat Reporting) in 1998 "for her consistently illuminating coverage of the United States Supreme Court." In 2004, she received the Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism and the John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism. She was a Radcliffe Institute Medal winner in 2006.
When she was at Radcliffe, she said in a speech given in 2006, "I was the Harvard stringer for the Boston Herald, which regularly printed, and paid me for, my accounts of student unrest and other newsworthy events at Harvard. But when it came time during my senior year to look for a job in journalism, the Herald would not even give me an interview, and neither would the Boston Globe, because these newspapers had no interest in hiring women."
Some critics, notably retired Appeals Court Judge Laurence H. Silberman, have complained of what they call the "Greenhouse Effect." They believe that some federal judges have changed their opinions to win favorable coverage, either in the New York Times or in the legal press in general, which they view as being part of the "Liberal Establishment." This criticism seems directed less at Greenhouse personally than at a general assumption of a liberal media bias.
Greenhouse has also been criticized for her failure to maintain the appearance of objectivity. Greenhouse expresses her personal views as an outspoken advocate for abortion rights and critic of conservative religious values.In 1989, Greenhouse was rebuked by Times editors for participating in an abortion-rights rally in Washington.The New York Times public editor Daniel Okrent said that he has never received a single complaint of bias in Greenhouse's coverage.
Harvard speech
She has also faced criticism for a June 2006 speech at Harvard University criticizing US policies and actions at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and Haditha. In the speech, Greenhouse said she started crying a few years back at a Simon & Garfunkel concert because her generation hadn't done a better job of running the country than previous generations:
Media critic Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post commented, "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?" Kurtz quoted Greenhouse defending her comments, calling them "statements of fact," not opinion.
Daniel Okrent, the first public editor, or in-house journalism critic, of the New York Times, said of Greenhouse's remarks: "It's been a basic tenet of journalism ... that the reporter's ideology [has] to be suppressed and submerged, so the reader has absolute confidence that what he or she is reading is not colored by previous views."
Greenhouse responded to the criticism saying, "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."
She told National Public Radio: "I said what I said in a public place. Let the chips fall where they may."
Greenhouse in the news
On August 9, 2007, a television crew from C-SPAN was forbidden to film a panel discussion at a meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. Greenhouse had told organizers that she would not be able "answer [questions] as fully and frankly" as she would be if the session were not filmed. The Vice-President of programming at C-SPAN, Terence Murphy questioned the decision, "If professors of journalism and working journalists taking part in a journalism education conference don’t stand up for open media access to public policy discussions, who will?”
Suggestions of conflict of interest
Ed Whelan, writing in a blog associated with National Review, suggested that Greenhouse had an obligation to her readers to inform them when reporting on a Supreme Court case that her husband Eugene Fidell had submitted an amicus brief.Fidell submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in the Hamdan case. Fidell also submitted an amicus brief in the Boumediene case when it was at the D.C. Circuit level before it went to the Supreme Court.
Emily Bazelon and Dahlia Lithwick, writing in Slate magazine, defended Greenhouse from Whelan's criticism.They quoted Yale Law School professor Judith Resnik who pointed out that Whelan had been unable to point to any actual sign of bias.
