Bloggers routinely criticize newspapers as old media, hopelessly old school, for their insistence that journalists not reveal their personal beliefs and biases on any issue remotely connected to what they’re covering. Where’s the transparency? they ask.
I agree, to some extent. I don’t know exactly where the line should be drawn. But I’m fairly certain that Byron Calame (above), the public editor of the New York Times, has it wrong today when he drags stellar New York Times Supreme Court correspondent Linda Greenhouse through the ringer for remarks she made at Harvard this summer criticizing the government “for creating law-free zones at Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Haditha, other places around the world.”
In Hazarding Personal Opinions in Public Can Be Hazardous for Journalists, he writes:
A FOUR-MONTH-OLD speech by Linda Greenhouse, The New York Times’s much-honored Supreme Court reporter for 28 years, has suddenly raised anew two thorny questions related to the paper’s ethics guideline covering the public expression of personal opinions by news staffers.
How do top editors at The Times interpret and enforce the policy when a star reporter is involved? And what is the value of such an ethical standard, given that journalists are human and have personal opinions?
Back on June 7, Ms. Greenhouse gave a luncheon speech before about 800 people at Harvard University after receiving the Radcliffe Institute Medal. But it wasn’t until Sept. 26, when NPR broadcast a story quoting several opinions Ms. Greenhouse expressed in the speech, that a wider audience, including top Times editors, became aware of her comments.
The government, Ms. Greenhouse said on the NPR audio version of her speech, “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, other places around the world, the U.S. Congress, whatever. And let’s not forget the sustained assault on women’s reproductive freedom and the hijacking of public policy by religious fundamentalism.” She later added, “I feel a growing obligation to reach out across the ridiculous actual barrier that we seem about to build on the Mexican border. …”
The Times’s ethical guideline states that news staffers appearing on radio or television “should avoid expressing views that go beyond what they would be allowed to say in the paper.” It is obvious, I think, that the guideline also applies to other venues. And Bill Keller, the executive editor, made clear in an e-mail message to me that the standard applies to all Times journalists “when they speak in public.”
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. …
Ms. Greenhouse told me she considers her remarks at Harvard to be “statements of fact” — not opinion — that would be allowed to appear in a Times news article. She said The Times has not suggested that she avoid writing stories on any of the topics on which she commented in June. “Any such limits would be completely preposterous,” she said.
Preposterous indeed. Yet that is exactly what Calame proposes here.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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