Greenhouse began her 40-year career at The New York Times covering state government in the paper's bureau in Albany. After completing her master's degree on a Ford Foundation fellowship, she returned to the Times and covered 29 sessions of the Supreme Court from 1978 to 2007, with the exception of two years during the mid-1980s during which she covered Congress. Since 1981, she has published over 2,800 articles in the Times. She has been a regular guest on the PBS program Washington Week. Book Awards Dinner in Washington, DC on December 7, 2018. In 2008, Greenhouse accepted an offer from The Times for an early retirement at the end of the Supreme Court session in the summer of 2008. Seven of the nine sitting Justices attended a goodbye party for Greenhouse on June 12, 2008. She continues to blog for The Times in the "Opinionator" section. In 2010, Greenhouse and co-author Reva Siegel put out a book on the development of the abortion debate prior to the 1973 Supreme Court ruling on the subject: Before Roe v. Wade. This was largely a selection of primary documents, though with some commentary. Greenhouse criticized US policies and actions at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and Haditha in a 2006 speech at Harvard University. In it, Greenhouse said she started crying a few years back at a Simon & Garfunkel concert because her generation hadn't done a better job of running the country than previous generations.
Awards and prizes
Greenhouse was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Journalism 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
Greenhouse has expressed her personal views as an outspoken advocate for abortion rights and critic of conservative religious values, and a 2006 report on NPR questioned whether this compromised the appearance that she maintains journalistic neutrality on such matters. New York Times public editor Daniel Okrent said that he has never received a single complaint of bias in Greenhouse's coverage.
Journalism conference, 2007
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 if the session were filmed. The vice president of programming at C-SPAN, Terence Murphy, questioned the decision: "If professors of journalism and working journalists taking part in a journalism education conference don't stand up for open media access to public policy discussions, who will?"
, writing in a blog associated with National Review, suggested that Greenhouse had an obligation to her readers to inform them when she reported on a Supreme Court case that her husband, Eugene Fidell, had submitted an amicus brief: He had submitted an amicus brief in the Hamdan case. Fidell also submitted an amicus brief in the Boumediene case when it was at the D.C. Circuit level before it went to the Supreme Court. Clark Hoyt, the public editor of the New York Times, opined that the paper "should have clued in readers" to Greenhouse's conflict, but defended the neutrality of her coverage. Emily Bazelon and Dahlia Lithwick, writing in Slate magazine, complained that the New York Times "had failed to stand up" for Greenhouse and defended Greenhouse from Whelan's criticism. They quoted Yale Law School professor Judith Resnik who pointed out that Whelan had been unable to point to any actual sign of bias. In a rebuttal in the National Review, Whelan asserted both that Bazelon and Lithwick had resorted to "baseless ad hominem attacks and to catty comments about 'right-wing kitty cats.'" He then refutes the claim that he did not provide any actual examples of bias, and points readers to a previous article in his series on Greenhouse's alleged conflict of interest.
