Linda Greenhouse (left) at the Phi Beta Kappa Book Awards Dinner in Washington, DC on December 7, 2018.
Greenhouse began her 40-year career at The New York Times covering state government in the paper's bureau in Albany.[2] After completing her master's degree on a Ford Foundation fellowship, she returned to the Times and covered every session of the Supreme Court from 1978 to 2007,[10] with the exception of two years in the mid-1980s when she was a Congressional reporter.[7] Since 1981, she has published over 2,800 articles in the Times.[11] She has been a regular guest on the PBS program Washington Week.[12]
At the conclusion of the Supreme Court session in the summer of 2008, Greenhouse accepted a Times offer for early retirement.[13] Seven of the nine sitting Justices attended a goodbye party for her on June 12, 2008.[14] After retiring, she continued to blog for the Times in their "Opinionator" section,[14][15] and wrote occasional guest columns.
In 2010, Greenhouse and Reva Siegel co-authored a book on the history of the U.S. abortion debate prior to the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Titled Before Roe v. Wade, the book is largely a selection of primary documents, with commentary provided by the two authors.
From 2010 to 2021, Greenhouse wrote a bi-weekly opinion column for The New York Times, centered on the Supreme Court and the law.[16] Since 2016, she has been a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books.[17]
In a 2006 speech at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Greenhouse criticized US policies and actions at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and Haditha.[18] In the speech, she recalled her struggles as a young woman with gender discrimination: "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."[19] She also told an anecdote about attending a Simon & Garfunkel reunion concert in 2003. She said that midway through the concert she surprised herself by suddenly breaking into tears as she realized her generation had not done a better job than previous generations of running the country.[19]
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."[7] In 2004, she received the Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism[20] and the John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism.[21] She was a Radcliffe Institute Medal winner in 2006.[22]
Accusations of bias
Greenhouse has often publicly expressed her views in support of abortion rights, and in opposition to conservative religious values.[18] A 2006 report on NPR questioned whether Greenhouse's outspokenness on such matters compromised the appearance of journalistic neutrality which she has maintained.[18] In response, New York Times editor Daniel Okrent said he had never received a single complaint of bias in Greenhouse's many years of covering the Supreme Court.[23][24]
Ed Whelan, writing in a blog associated with the National Review, suggested that Greenhouse was obligated to inform her readers when she reported on a Supreme Court case for which her husband, Eugene Fidell, had submitted an amicus brief,[25] such as in the Hamdan case and the Boumediene case. Clark Hoyt of The New York Times opined that the paper "should have clued in readers" to Greenhouse's conflict, but defended the neutrality of her reporting.[26] In a Slate article, Emily Bazelon and Dahlia Lithwick faulted The New York Times for failing "to stand up" for Greenhouse and defend her from Whelan's criticism.[27] They quoted Yale Law School professor Judith Resnik who pointed out that Whelan was unable to cite any actual examples of bias.
— (2010). Before Roe v. Wade: Voices that Shaped the Abortion Debate Before the Supreme Court's Ruling. New York: Kaplan Publishing. ISBN978-1607146711. Co-authored with Reva Siegel.
— (2016). The Burger Court and the Rise of the Judicial Right. Simon & Schuster. ISBN978-1476732503. Co-authored with Michael J. Graetz.
— (2017). Just a Journalist: On the Press, Life, and the Spaces Between. Harvard University Press. ISBN978-0674980334.
— (2021). 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. ISBN978-0593447932.
— (2023). The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. ISBN978-0197689462.
↑ Prager, Dennis (May 4, 2010). "When Jews on the Left See Americans on the Right as Nazis". Jewish Journal. Archived from the original on January 26, 2017. Retrieved September 4, 2018. Another liberal Jewish commentator for The New York Times, Linda Greenhouse, likened the situation of illegal immigrants in Arizona to that of the Jews of Nazi-occupied Denmark.
↑ Emily Bazelon; Dahlia Lithwick (January 22, 2008). "Lay Off Linda: Why doesn't the New York Times stand up for Linda Greenhouse?". Slate magazine. Archived from the original on January 28, 2008. Retrieved January 25, 2008. Whelan didn't point to any concrete problem with Greenhouse's handling of these cases. That should be easier to do than with almost any other reporter, given that Greenhouse relies primarily on court filings and oral arguments that are publicly available in their entirety, as Yale law professor Judith Resnik points out to us. Unable to point to any actual bias, Whelan resorts to the petulant claim that the effect of Fidell's involvement in the detainee cases 'would be impossible to separate ... from the broader political bias that pervades so much of Greenhouse's reporting.
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