Via Orin Kerr comes the news that Linda Greenhouse, the former New York Times Supreme Court reporter, has joined the board of the American Constitution Society. The ACS press release praises Greenhouse and the other new board members for the ability to help the ACS “promote discussion, debate and understanding of a progressive legal and public policy vision.” Well, it certainly ought to promote debate! For years, of course, Greenhouse has been accused of harboring a liberal political view and airing it, more or less subtly, in her reporting; heck, she’s even had an “effect” named after her. She has been more clear about airing her political views in her speeches, although even then she often defended such airing of opinion as mere “statements of fact,” but she certainly has always denied promoting her views through her reporting.
That Greenhouse has now joined the ACS board does not, I must emphasize, mean her reporting was ever biased; it’s possible to harbor personal views but subordinate them to the task at hand. Perhaps Greenhouse did just that. Nor do I think it impermissible for her to join the board now, since she has since left the Times and landed a sinecure at Yale Law School. Personally, I have always thought her work was excellent, and that she was the best Supreme Court reporter in the news media. But I always also thought that she certainly did at times evince her politics in her work, and I could never quite take seriously those who were a little too full-throated in defending her work as utterly neutral. I suppose that’s fine if you think bias is inevitable in journalism — I find that statement both accurate as far as it goes and woefully, often sneeringly, incomplete as a description of the ways in which journalists can and do strive for a measure of fairness and objectivity. But the Times certainly champions a vision of objectivity in reporting, and Greenhouse never said otherwise, as far as I know, so I hardly think that defense would be open to her. That she has now joined a specifically politically progressive group does not irrefutably demonstrate that Greenhouse ever failed to do her job on the TImes, but I still find it somewhat disturbing, and I would not be offended if her critics viewed this as vindicating their prior views of her (provided, as I say, that they did not treat her action as irrefutably vindicating their criticisms; it doesn’t). Would we think differently if someone who had long been accused of (and denied) conservative bias in reporting the Court joined the Federalist Society board after retiring from active journalism? Wouldn’t most of Greenhouse’s erstwhile defenders treat this as strong evidence that they had been right, so to speak, all along? I frankly think this was either a very poor choice on Greenhouse’s part, or a very telling one.
Posted by Paul Horwitz on March 21, 2009 at 05:05 PM