A follow-up to my critique of Linda Greenhouse’s latest: Greenhouse’s own ethical improprieties would suggest that she may not be well suited to think clearly about issues of ethical conflict. Among other things:

In 2006, New York Times public editor Byron Calame forcefully condemned Greenhouse for violating the paper’s ethical guidelines by asserting, in a speech at Radcliffe, that the government “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.” Calame rejected Greenhouse’s ridiculous defense of her remarks as “‘statements of fact’—not opinion—that would be allowed to appear in a Times news article”:

[A]s the influential Supreme Court reporter for The Times, a beat that touches nearly all areas of public policy, Ms. Greenhouse has an overriding obligation to avoid publicly expressing these kinds of personal opinions…. Bemoaning the difficulties journalists face in being citizens strikes an old-fashioned editor like me as whining…. Keeping personal opinions out of the public realm is simply one of the obligations for those who remain committed to the importance of impartial news coverage.

And in 2008 Greenhouse resigned from the Times in the wake of my exposure of her undisclosed conflict of interest in reporting on major national-security cases (Boumediene and Hamdan) in which her husband submitted amicus briefs. Even Clark Hoyt, the shill then serving as NYT’s public editor, validated the heart of my complaint against Greenhouse (even as he somehow saw fit to take some baseless whacks at me).