In today’s paper, the New York Times’s public editor Byron Calame addresses the Linda Greenhouse issue. Did the Times’s Supreme Court reporter go too far last June, when she said in a speech that the U.S. 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”? And what about her comments on immigration from the same speech, in which she said, “I feel a growing obligation to reach out across the ridiculous actual barrier that we seem about to build on the Mexican border…”? From Calame:

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.
The reaction of The Times has been muted so far, however. Mr. Keller acknowledged in his e-mail to me that he has talked to Ms. Greenhouse about her remarks, but would not disclose what he said or whether her role would change. There was a more public Times response in 1989 when The Washington Post reported that Ms. Greenhouse and some Post journalists had participated in a march in support of abortion rights. In The Times’s catch-up article, Howell Raines, then the paper’s Washington editor, said of Ms. Greenhouse, “She now acknowledges that this was a mistake and accepts the policy.”
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.