Linda Greenhouse: “Just a Journalist”

By Susan Newhart Elliott, Professor & Director of Zimmerman Law Library | University of Dayton School of Law | selliott1@udayton.edu

The 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 providing 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-

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ent both sides of a story too often produces a “he-said-she-said” frame with quotes from “experts” that may range from benign lobbying to factual untruths. Quotes presented without context or correction can provide credibility to positions that are utterly false. Similarly, journalists wishing to avoid the appearance of personal bias use distancing techniques that are actually misleading, cautiously describing fact as if it were merely one opinion. Greenhouse looks to Felix Frankfurter: “The responsibility of those in power is not to reflect inflamed public feeling but to help form its understanding.”

Part 3 recounts Greenhouse’s own career in journalism and provides a fascinating history of journalistic practice in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, beginning with her days as writer and editor of her high school newspaper, her time as the only woman in her Radcliffe class to be elected to The Harvard Crimson, and her one-year internship and subsequent employment with the New York Times – after such newspapers as the Boston Herald and the Boston Globe politely declined to interview the Phi Beta Kappa Radcliffe graduate for their all-male reporting staffs.

Most Times reporters covering the Supreme Court have had law degrees, and Greenhouse did not expect to join them. However, after 4 years of covering New York state politics, she was unexpectedly offered a Ford Foundation Fellowship. The program invited a small group of journalists to join the first-year class at Yale Law School, taking basic courses and electives with the goal of receiving a master’s degree at the end of the year. In spring 1978, Greenhouse was assigned to the Times Washington Bureau. When she arrived, however, the Times had suspended operations because of a printers’ union strike. Greenhouse attended court every day on her own time, reading documents and becoming acclimated to Supreme Court practice and procedures. She concluded that as a law student she had learned very little about the Court “beneath the level of high theory.” When the strike ended, she began in earnest what would become a 30-year stint reporting on the Supreme Court for the New York Times.

Greenhouse’s convictions about the importance of understanding Supreme Court practice and procedures never diminished. Those convictions would later result in her initiating a popular course at Yale Law School on The Institutional Supreme Court and in her book The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press 2012, 2nd ed. 2020), a must-read for aspiring law students. Those convictions have also influenced her analytical works on the Supreme Court, including The Burger Court and the Rise of the Judicial Right (co-authored with Michael Graetz, Simon &Schuster 2016) and the wonderful Becoming Justice Blackmun: Harry Blackmun’s Supreme Court Journey (Times Books 2005).

The title of the latter is intentional and instructive. This is not a comprehensive biography of Harry Blackmun (perhaps best known as the author of the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade). It is the revealing history of Blackmun’s evolutionary path to the Justice he would become. It addresses the whys, the paths not taken, and the “what-nexts” of his relationships with law, legal theory, particular cases (especially Roe), the public, fellow justices, and Supreme Court practice – not unlike Greenhouse’s autobiographical Just a Journalist.

All in all, however, it must be noted – as it was by Kitty Kelly in reviewing Just a Journalist (Washington Independent Review of Books 2019) – Linda Greenhouse is “just a journalist,” only in the same sense that “Secretariat is just a horse.”