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How journalists’ personal views may or may not color their reporting is an issue that arises often these days. In the past, we’ve looked at the questions – and the consequences – that come up when reporters personal views are aired in public venues, and how that might affect the audience's perception of the fairness of their reporting. Yesterday, NPR’s David Folkenflik brought another story that addresses those questions. Pulitzer Prize-winning Supreme Court reporter for the New York Times, Linda Greenhouse, offered some personal views on a few of the more controversial issues facing the Supreme court during a speech at Harvard University. Writes Folkenflik:

[Greenhouse] reminisced a bit about the 1960s idealism that defined her college years, and told an audience of 800 she had wept at a Simon and Garfunkel concert when she was struck by the unfulfilled promise of her own generation.

Greenhouse went on to charge that since then, the U.S. government had "turned its energy and attention away from upholding the rule of law and toward creating law-free zones at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Haditha and other places around the world -- [such as] the U.S. Congress."

She also observed a "sustained assault on women's reproductive freedom and the hijacking of public policy by religious fundamentalism. To say that these last few years have been dispiriting is an understatement."

A few weeks after that speech, the Supreme Court knocked down some of the government's assertion of executive powers involving detainees at Guantanamo. And the court will soon hear arguments in an abortion case.

A host of critics questioned Greenhouse’s judgment in airing her personal views on the very matters that she covers for the Times. Former Times public editor Daniel Okrent told NPR:

"It's been a basic tenet of journalism ... that the reporter's ideology [has] to be suppressed and submerged, so the reader has absolute confidence that what he or she is reading is not colored by previous views.”

UPDATE: PE reader (and frequent commenter) Joyce West writes in to draw our attention to a recent obituary in the Kentucky Herald Leader for John Ed Pearce, Pulitzer Prize winner and an “elder statesman of journalism in Kentucky,” who died recently at 89. West points out that some of the issues raised in the Greenhouse story are echoed in aspects of Pearce’s professional life...

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