On NRO today is my essay “Far From Sober: Slate’s defense of Linda Greenhouse” responding to a Slate essay yesterday evening by Emily Bazelon and Dahlia Lithwick. Here’s my opening paragraph:
In “Lay Off Linda: Why doesn’t the New York Times stand up for Linda Greenhouse,” Slate’s Emily Bazelon and Dahlia Lithwick offer a hilariously defective defense of Linda Greenhouse’s reporting on prominent national-security cases in which her husband Eugene Fidell, an outspoken opponent of Bush Administration policies, has participated. Whereas I have demonstrated (in this series of Bench Memos posts: Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4) that New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt has acted as a shill for Greenhouse, they complain that he has “dragg[ed] … her out to the woodshed.” Most remarkably, they call on the New York Times to stop providing (horrors!) “sober explications” of complaints about her reporting.