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The Gas Over Linda GreenhouseDoes a reporter have a duty to appear on C-SPAN?

By Jack Shafer
Posted Friday, Aug. 10, 2007, at 6:11 PM ET
Linda Greenhouse. Click image to expand.

The Columbia Journalism Review portrays New York Times reporter Linda Greenhouse as a petulant prima donna today in a post titled "The Greenhouse Effect: Hurricane Linda blows C-SPAN cameras away."

Greenhouse was one of a half-dozen Supreme Court reporters (including Slate's Dahlia Lithwick) who agreed to talk about their beat at the convention of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, now being held in Washington. Greenhouse says she first learned that C-SPAN was covering the event when she arrived at the classroom-sized meeting room and saw the channel's cameras. Other panelists had received e-mails the day before informing that C-SPAN would be recording the event, but Greenhouse had not. She protested the cameras, and CJR's Gal Beckerman writes:

[A]t the last minute, the plug was pulled on the C-SPAN cameras because the queen bee of Supreme Court reporters, Linda Greenhouse of The New York Times refused to join the panel if the event was going to be covered by the wonky news channel.

Not so, says Greenhouse. She says she informed AEJMC that C-SPAN cameras would inhibit her from freely expressing herself but never threatened to bolt the session. Greenhouse gave a similar account to the convention's own reporter, who wrote that AEJMC was responsible for dismissing the cameras. (Amy Gajda, who moderated the panel, did not respond to a phone call for comment about the furor.)

Far from being C-SPAN averse, Greenhouse has appeared on the channel so many times you could launch C-SPAN 4 tomorrow and fill it with Greenhouse reruns. According to C-SPAN Vice President Terence Murphy, Greenhouse has appeared at 51 different events covered by the channel. (Green-SPAN, anyone?)

Greenhouse says "the principle of the thing" made her say no to the cameras. "There's a difference between speaking to 50 professors and speaking on national TV," she says, "even in the Internet era." In a letter to C-SPAN's Murphy, Greenhouse notes that "over the years," she's declined to appear at events she assumed were private but then learned at the 11th hour "that C-Span coverage was a fait accompli." In essence, her argument is that she was invited to a dinner party that the organizers decided—without properly notifying her—to turn into Woodstock II.

As C-SPAN packed away its cameras at the Renaissance Washington Hotel, I was down the hall serving on a different AEJMC panel. How would I have felt if I had been asked to appear on the channel on the same short notice? Grouchy. My assignment was to comment on the oral presentations given by four academics on the topic of myth, lies, and journalism history. Because I had only a vague idea of what three of the four presenters were going to say, I couldn't really prepare anything substantive. I don't think I made a fool out of myself, but I might feel otherwise had my schematic remarks been recorded and I ended up viewing them on C-SPAN.

CJR's Beckerman writes that Greenhouse may have "used the power that comes from being associated with the Times to prove nothing more than that she could get her way." That speculation would have bite if somebody could prove, for example, that Greenhouse demands that Washington Week's producers serve only yellow M&Ms in its green room as a condition of appearing on the show. But they can't. Greenhouse can be stubborn, but I've never known her to lord it over others. Besides, what sort of diva agrees to appear gratis on a huge panel of colleagues to talk to a roomful of out-of-town academics about her profession? Case not proved.

Like other reporters who cover big beats for big media, Greenhouse gets the scrutiny she deserves—not only for her pieces but her extracurricular activities. A raft of criticism came her way in 2006 when she gave a Radcliffe Institute talk about the "law-free zones at Guantanamo Bay," the government's "sustained assault on women's reproductive freedom and the hijacking of public policy by religious fundamentalism." Those were "statements of fact," she told the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz, not opinion. She continued:

The notion that someone cannot go and speak from the heart to a group of college classmates and fellow alums, without being accountable to self-appointed media watchdogs, means American journalism is in danger of strangling in its own sanctimony.

Greenhouse seems to have spoken her mind at the AEJMC panel once things settled down. When asked about the "Greenhouse Effect" ($) that purportedly causes freshman Supreme Court justices to vote in such manner as to earn admiring copy from the Greenhouse pen, she quipped, "If there is such a thing as the Greenhouse Effect, I suppose it wasn't working this term."

******

Hey, I thought Nina Totenberg was the queen bee of Supreme Court reporters. Is this column payback for CJR trashing Slate's piece about Giuliani's daughter's Facebook page? No! I agree with CJR! Trash me at . (E-mail may be quoted by name in "The Fray," Slate's readers' forum, in a future article, or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)

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Photograph of Linda Greenhouse from Wikipedia Commons.
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Remarks from the Fray:

As mentioned, she's been on C-SPAN quite a lot, so how could she possibly claim that the presence of cameras would "inhibit her from freely expressing herself"?

This seemingly indicates that when she does appear in front of cameras, she's spewing pre-digested crap rather than giving us her actual analysis.

Now, I recognize that appearing before a camera is a bit different from appearing before a small group. For one, the audience on the other side of the camera isn't there to give you feedback. I can ask a person sitting in front of me if what I am saying is making sense, see their facial expressions, and get feedback as to how what I am saying is being received. You can't do that if the audience isn't there.

But how does that lead to being "inhibited" when on camera? Sure, you'll choose your words more carefully since you don't have the ability to correct misunderstandings right there and then, but that is a question of taking care of your speaking, not "inhibiting" it.

The only thing that claiming you're "inhibited from freely expressing yourself" if you're put in front of a camera proves is that you hold some ideas you'd rather people in general didn't know about and don't want to be held accountable for.

--Rrhain

(To reply, click here.)

Why is it Justice Scalia bans coverage by "professional journalists" when he speaks and is attacked forthwith for chilling the exercise of first amendment rights, and yet, these self-same moralists ditto his actions when the "eye" is directed toward them?

Just as psychiatrists must go through psychoanalysis prior to setting up practice, so too journalists should be the subject of a media circus before they take on a beat. It would give them an insight no amount of experience would provide.

The right claims major media is liberal biased. If only that were true, we would better served than what we are getting -- which the right has latched onto and repainted for its own political agenda.

Journalism along with preaching and lobbying are the only professions that get top billing in the Bill of Rights. Unlike physicians, lawyers, electricians, builders, teachers, and a host of other trades and professions, journalist are protected from licensing, boards, or any laws that govern them. Anyone can be journalist.

There are only two ways to control journalism, self regulation by their peers -- which pretty much looks the other way -- and the market -- which is scaring the hell out of them. Ms. Greenhouse isn't worried about what her fellow journalists will do or say about her but she is worried when the camera is turned on her and what she says and does goes on the cable or YouTube.

--scout29c

(To reply, click here.)

I actually think that Greenhouse was on pretty solid ground. She accepted an invitation to speak with a group of academics, and was not told that the session would be broadcast in advance. It's not as if they invited her to give a speech and were upfront about the fact that C-SPAN would be taping, she accepted, and THEN demanded that there be no cameras. It sounds like she objected to something akin to a bait-and-switch, whether intentional or inadvertent, by the program planners.

I'm also wondering where people get the idea that journalists somehow have an obligation to be on television whenever anyone else wants them to. Reporting is her *job,* and so far as I can tell, no one other than her employer can tell her when she has to be doing her job. As a former academic, I can say that there are very good reasons not to want to have discussions televised; really good discussions involve people putting ideas out for others to comment on, testing ideas that you may or may not commit to, etc. There has to be some freedom to try things out, to say things that you don't really mean for the sake of helping someone develop an idea (like playing Devil's Advocate), etc., that you just can't do if there is a camera in the room.

--Kit-Kat

(To reply, click here.)

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