On Tuesday night, in the first of three talks she’ll give at Harvard this week, Linda Greenhouse ’68 shared some war stories and showed some scars. An online-only columnist for The New York Times since 2008, and before that its longtime Supreme Court reporter, Greenhouse is delivering this year’s Massey Lectures in American Studies. In the first, she tried to throw some light on an uneasy subject: the tension for reporters between journalism and citizenship. It’s murky and complicated territory, Greenhouse told the audience, and more than once she’s found herself on the wrong side of the “ambiguous and shifting boundary” that separates one role from the other in the “increasingly fragile but still vitally important world of mainstream journalism.”
Most recently that happened in June 2006 in Radcliffe Yard, where Greenhouse—a Pulitzer Prize winner, lecturer and journalist-in-residence at Yale Law School, and, later, member of Harvard’s Board of Overseers—was awarded the Radcliffe Institute Medal. She gave a speech that day in which she criticized the Bush administration’s “law-free zones at Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Haditha, and other places around the world” and its “sustained assault on women's reproductive freedom and the hijacking of public policy by religious fundamentalism.”
After an NPR reporter got hold of the speech three months later, the episode exploded into controversy. Greenhouse was accused of being an activist, of abandoning journalistic objectivity, of crossing an uncrossable line. She disagreed. She still does. Reporters’ opinions don’t belong in the stories they write—and weren’t in hers—she said, but it’s another thing altogether to ask reporters not to have opinions at all. She reminded Tuesday’s audience that her criticism of those “law-free zones” echoed the Supreme Court’s own assessment in 2004, when it ruled in Rasul v. Bush that the administration was wrong to keep Guantánamo prisoners beyond the reach of American courts. Quoting an article in the Columbia Journalism Review, which rose to the defense of another Times reporter, military correspondent Michael Gordon, when he came under fire in 2006 for expressing a personal opinion on the American military buildup, Greenhouse said, “To not allow its reporters to speak out in public forums for fear of letting slip a less nuanced while still honest appraisal of stories they know inside and out betrays a misunderstanding of the role of journalism in the public realm.”
The vise seems to Greenhouse to be narrowing. Arguing that “the ranks have closed” in recent years “around the most reflexive responses” to the question of reporters’ role and behavior, she offered up former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie as a kind of cautionary tale. “On his retirement in 2008,” she said, “Downie described his personal code of journalistic ethics: ‘I didn’t just stop voting; I stopped having private opinions about politicians or issues, so that I would have a completely open mind in supervising our coverage.’” Greenhouse let his words sink in for a second. Then she said, “Can this highly accomplished man really have believed that the highest and best use of a journalist’s mind is to erase all of it?”
Almost two decades earlier, in 1989, Greenhouse had been at the center of another storm, after participating in a march on the Mall in Washington, D.C., supporting women’s abortion rights. She wasn’t the only reporter there—and she wasn’t the only one motivated to attend for personal rather than professional reasons—but she went as a private citizen without press credentials, and the reaction from many corners was dismay. Even now, she said, she gets e-mails and phone calls from journalism students writing papers on the incident. “Over the years, I’ve watched as the abortion-march episode entered the realm of journalism mythology, changing shape along the way,” she said. Invariably, the students who contact her believe that she tried to hide her participation. In fact, she’d told plenty of coworkers she was going and even invited her bosses along, she said; no one told her not to go. Only afterward did the idea arise that it was a mistake.
“It seemed impossible,” Greenhouse said, for the students “to believe that at the moment I actually marched, I had no reason to think of hiding. The students had trouble grasping the fact... that it had not always been the case that sanctimony was seen as the best defense against criticism. They listened politely to my correction of their narrative, but the facts seemed beyond the point. The point was to draw the line between the permitted and the prohibited. There had to be a line somewhere, didn’t there?”
Two lectures remain; in tonight’s, scheduled for 5:30 p.m. at Sackler Auditorium, Greenhouse discusses what she considers a related conundrum: “Journalism’s struggle to serve two masters: the rule of fair and balanced and the truth.” Not every story has two sides, she said on Tuesday. Some have only one, and others may have many. “‘Fair and balanced’ insulates against criticism, but does it serve the higher good of arming readers with what they need to navigate a complicated world?” The press’s linguistic dance around torture and “enhanced interrogations” will be a big part of the discussion. “It’s really a paradigm case for my larger point,” Greenhouse said. “There was a lot of struggle and conflict within the journalism mainstream community, and a lot of cowardice.”
On Thursday, also at 5:30 at Sackler, Greenhouse returns to her own experiences in a final lecture titled “Changes.”
