Tuesday, October 30, 2007
News / News Bites The Torments of Kurt Eichenwald
Posted by Michael Miner on Tue, Oct 30, 2007 at 3:53 PM
Kurt Eichenwald may be the most baffling figure in American journalism. While an award-winning business reporter for the New York Times, he paid at least $2,000 to a teenage Internet porn purveyor he eventually wrote about at length in the Times in 2005. Eichenwald says he was trying to lead the boy out of the life and gave him money to help earn his trust, but the payment violated Times policy and Eichenwald didn't mention it to his editors. When they finally found out, long after Eichenwald had left the paper, it was obliged to publish a long, embarrassing acknowledgment. What was left unexplained was what had really been going on?
I blogged at length about Eichenwald last March and mentioned him in July, both times presenting him in the context of his most expert and hostile critic. That's Debbie Nathan, a former Reader reporter whom Eichenwald has threatened to sue for $10 million. Now New York magazine has published a long, sympathetic, but unsparing portrait of Eichenwald. Here's a sample:
"The fight he’s found himself in has wreaked havoc on his life. He’s teary, volatile, largely unable to work. He left the Times, then walked away from a large contract at Portfolio. His career is in tatters. For this, he blames a campaign by the convicts he’s exposed, other child molesters he doesn’t even know, random anonymous bloggers, and journalists, specifically the advocacy journalist Debbie Nathan, who has written several long pieces questioning his reporting methods and whom he calls 'the high priestess of pedophilia.' He believes they are acting in concert to destroy him, professionally and emotionally."
For what it's worth, there's not a lick of evidence in the article that Nathan is the high priestess of anything. The quote appears because of what it says about his state of mind, not hers.
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Obviously, his epileptic amnesia did not subtract him of his arrogance.
It very annoying that no reporter (other than Debbie Nathan) is willing to ask Kurt Eichenwald a simple question that might resolve many of the issues. Why did Justin Berry reactivate his dormant website justinsfriends.com ten days after receiving Eichenwald's check for $2,000? It is my understanding that Nathan has asked Eichenwald this question numerous times, and he has simply refused to answer. It should also be noted that in French's article Eichenwald finally admits that he has viewed illegal porn. According to French: "Eichenwald says Berry showed him the preview video for his Website. It featured him and a kid named “Taylor,†side by side on a bed masturbating. Taylor, Berry said, was just 14 years old." The Eichenwald-Nathan feud began when Nathan wrote an article saying that reporters sometimes had to view illegal material in order to do their jobs, and cited Eichenwald as an example. Eichenwald reacted bitterly, asserted that he had never view illegal porn except accidentally (and then reported it to the Feds), and threatened to sue Nathan. It looks to me like Kurt owes Debbie an apology.
Not sure what the right answer is, but having read Eichenwald's absolutely gripping book "The Informant," about a ADM insider who informs on agricultural price-fixing to the FBI while simultaneously embezzling loads of money, I'd at least think he'd understand the natural skepticism that a reporter would have about a heroic whistleblower who's also unstable and involved in suspicious financial transactions. Weird, really.
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