New York Times Supreme Court reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner Linda Greenhouse gave a speech in June at her alma mater, Radcliffe, and it's readily apparent that she's tired of supressing her personal, political views.

In June, Linda Greenhouse returned to Cambridge, Mass., to be honored at Harvard. Greenhouse, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who covers the Supreme Court for The New York Times, 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."

Greenhouse's comments are reminiscent of those of her boss, "Pinch" Sulzberger who during a commencement address earlier this year apologized for all of the "failures" of the hippie generation.

I've advocated before that journalists should seriously consider dropping the vain attempt to achieve bias-free coverage -- or at the very least, let their biases be known so that the reader can take that into account when reading their stories.

Any close reader of Greenhouse's work, even without the knowledge of her past pro-choice activism, can tell where her biases reside. The only news is that she came out and revealed them.

The New York Times ethics policy bans political activism by its journalists and advises them not to say things on television they could not publish in the paper. But it doesn't appear to address this precise situation.

If this is accurate, then the Times' ethics policy amounts to nothing more a simple order to "not get caught" expressing your political views publicly.

Top New York Times editors Bill Keller and Jill Abramson declined to be interviewed for this story.

Little surprise there, but it certaily doesn't help the Times' already battered and bruised reputation.

Journalism. Wound. Self-inflicted.