Linda Greenhouse

Linda Greenhouse (born 1947-01-09 in New York City) is a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for The New York Times, covering the United States Supreme Court.

Education
Greenhouse received her BA degree in government from Radcliffe College in 1968 and a Master of Studies in Law from Yale Law School in 1978.

Career
She has covered the Supreme Court since 1978, with the exception of two years during the mid-1980s during which she covered the Congress. Since 1981, she has authored over 2,800 articles for the New York Times. She has been a regular guest on the PBS program Washington Week.

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." In 2004, she received the Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism and the John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism. She was a Radcliffe Institute Medal winner in 2006.

When she was at Radcliffe, she said in a speech given in 2006, "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."

Criticism of Greenhouse
Some critics on the political right, notably retired Appeals Court Judge Laurence H. Silberman have complained of what they call the "Greenhouse Effect." They believe that some federal judges have changed their opinions to win favorable coverage, either in the New York Times or in the legal press in general, which they view as being part of the "Liberal Establishment." This criticism seems directed less at Greenhouse personally than at a general assumption of a liberal media bias.

In 1989, she was rebuked by Times editors for participating in an abortion-rights rally in Washington. Though the New York Times public editor Daniel Okrent attests that he has never received a single complaint of bias in Greenhouse's coverage, some other media observers have been critical of the perception of bias that her personal actions create.

Harvard speech
She has also faced criticism for expressing publicly (at Harvard University in June, 2006) her personal views supporting abortion rights and criticism of US policies and actions at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and Haditha.

Greenhouse said that she started crying a few years back at a Simon & Garfunkel concert because her (Sixties) generation hadn't done a better job of running the country than previous generations:

Media critic Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post commented, "Don't those remarks, publicized last week by National Public Radio, go too far for a beat reporter covering such issues at the high court?" Kurtz quoted Greenhouse defending her comments, calling them "statements of fact," not opinion.

"The notion that someone cannot go and speak from the heart to a group of college classmates and fellow alums, without being accountable to self-appointed media watchdogs, means American journalism is in danger of strangling in its own sanctimony," Greenhouse said.

She told National Public Radio: "I said what I said in a public place. Let the chips fall where they may."

Greenhouse in the news
On August 9, 2007, a television crew from C-SPAN was forbidden to film a panel discussion at a meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. Greenhouse had told organizers that she would not be able "answer [questions] as fully and frankly" as she would be if the session were not filmed.