Linda Greenhouse: “Just a Journalist” By Susan Newhart Elliott, Professor & Director of Zimmerman Law Library | University of Dayton School of Law | selliott1@udayton.edu
T
he keynote speaker for the 2021 DBA Bench Bar Conference (November 5 at Sinclair) will be Yale Law School Senior Research Scholar and Clinical Lecturer in Law Linda Greenhouse, who describes herself as “just a journalist.” Greenhouse was a reporter for the New York Times from 1968 to 2008. Her many awards and honors include the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in Beat Reporting, “for her consistently illuminating coverage of the United States Supreme Court.” Since 2008, she has written a biweekly op-ed column on law as a contributing columnist to the Times. She has also authored and co-authored numerous articles and books, the most recent of which, Justice on the Brink: The Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Rise of Amy Coney Barrett, and Twelve Months That Transformed the Supreme Court (Random House) will come out on November 9. This work provides the theme for the Bench Bar Conference keynote address. Greenhouse’s 2008 decision to retire as a Times reporter and continue as a contributing columnist coincided with the enormous changes in journalism wrought by the Internet. By 2008, Supreme Court opinions were expected to be filed for the Times web site within minutes after being issued. Time pressures ended the shared lunches where colleagues dissected the cases and talked about the Court. The Court itself began to post argument transcripts, briefs, and other material online. Daily journalism was not rendered obsolete, but the added value was no longer in simply reporting the latest occurrences, which anyone could find online. The added value of journalism was in provid10
DAYTON Bar Briefs |
OCTOBER 2021
ing context, addressing the questions of why, what was omitted, what might happen next. The contributing columnist position offered Greenhouse more time for her work (including for new projects and audiences), and the “op-ed” label would permit expression of personal opinions – an increasingly difficult issue in “straight” reporting. Greenhouse’s experiences in and reflections about journalism are chronicled in her 2015 autobiographical work, Just a Journalist: On the Press, Life, and the Spaces Between (Harvard University Press). Most of Greenhouse’s work focuses on Supreme Court analysis. This book is personal. Part 1 explores the relationship between journalist and citizen, “question[ing] whether prevailing norms fix too rigid a boundary between the two roles.” Greenhouse recounts the public criticism for her activities (e.g. participation in a march) and remarks (e.g. in accepting an alumnae award at Radcliffe), all indisputably offered in her capacity as a private individual, not as a reporter. She quotes Leonard Downie (former managing editor of the Washington Post) for a prevailing view of journalistic ethics: “I didn’t just stop voting. I stopped having even private opinions about politicians or issues so that I would have a completely open mind in supervising our coverage.” Greenhouse argues that it simply cannot be that “the highest and best use of a
journalist’s mind is to erase from it all judgment on, or even all response to, the times in which he lives.” Part 2 examines the tensions between the journalist’s obligation to be objective, the traditional approaches to ensuring “fair and balanced” coverage, and the reality that the approaches and sense of obligation can distort the truth and destroy the real understanding that is critical to meaningful public debate. Greenhouse argues that, especially in the age of the Internet, the desire to pres-
Register now to hear Linda speak on Nov 5!
29th Annual DBA Bench Bar Conference
