Media: The Perils of Telling It Like It Is

Linda Greenhouse, who has covered the U.S. Supreme Court for The New York Times for the last 28 years, has a well deserved reputation for balanced coverage. Despite The Times' overall liberal bias, Greenhouse's careful reporting and writing has been the standard by which all other high court reporters are judged.

But you could hear gaskets blowing in The Times newsroom when National Public Radio aired a piece about the propriety of a speech that Greenhouse gave at Harvard University back in June focusing on the legal and judicial excesses of the Bush administration.

Greenhouse reminisced about 1960s idealism, but charged that since then the U.S. government had "turned its energy and attention away from upholding the rule of law and toward creating law-free zones at Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Haditha and other places around the world." She also attacked the "sustained assault on women's reproductive freedom" and "the hijacking of public policy by religious fundamentalism."

The NPR story provoked the usual outrage-to-order at right-wing media outlets and a food fight between Byron Calame, who is The Times' current public editor, and Daniel Okrent, his predecessor.

Calame wrote that:

"It seems clear to me that Ms. Greenhouse stepped across that line during her speech. Times news articles are not supposed to contain opinion. A news article containing the phrase 'the hijacking of public policy by religious fundamentalism' would get into the paper only as a direct quote from a source. The same would go for any news article reference to 'the ridiculous actual barrier' on the Mexican border."

Okrent, on the other hand, said in an interview that:

"I was kind of amazed and thrilled. . . . when I was at The Times for 18 months, Linda was writing about the most sensitive, divisive issues in America . . . and I never received a single complaint [about] any ideological bias in her work. . . . There's a distinction between what a journalist may think about the issues of the day and how the journalist writes about the issues of the day. And that's the way it ought to be.

Greenhouse told Calme that she considers her remarks to be “statements of fact” — not opinion -- and noted that The Times has not suggested that she avoid writing stories on any of the topics on which she commented. She added:

"Any such limits would be completely preposterous. The Harvard speech was an “unusual thing for me" because it involved speaking to fellow alumni "about our generation . . . about the culture of the times. I really felt I owed this audience the respect to speak from the heart."

I normally would side with Calme and not Okrent and Greenhouse on this one.

But these are extraordinary times -- something that the mainstream media has been painfully slow to recognize -- and they require extraordinary actions, whether that is a dozen retired generals calling for Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's hide or a Pulitzer Prize-winning Supreme Court reporter stating the obvious -- that the Bush administration has hijacked America.