Kurt Eichenwald

Kurt Alexander Eichenwald (born June 28, 1961) is an American journalist and a New York Times bestselling author of five books, one of which, The Informant (2000), was made into a motion picture in 2009.

He is senior investigative editor at The Conversation.

Formerly he was a senior writer and investigative reporter with The New York Times, Condé Nast's business magazine, Portfolio, and later was a contributing editor with Vanity Fair and a senior writer with Newsweek.

Eichenwald was born in 1961.

He has stated that he is "Episcopalian with a Jewish father."

He graduated from St. Mark's School of Texas in Dallas and Swarthmore College.

His extracurricular activities during his time at Swarthmore included being a founding member of Sixteen Feet, an a cappella vocal octet.

During his first months of college, Eichenwald sustained a concussion, which was soon followed by noticeable epileptic seizures.

Diagnosed with epilepsy in November of his freshman year, he continued to attend school despite repeated grand mal seizures.

After having two outdoor seizures on campus, he was dismissed from Swarthmore, in apparent violation of federal law.

He contacted the United States Department of Health and Human Services and fought his way back into school, an experience that he has credited with giving him the willingness to take on institutions in his muckraking reporting.

He graduated with his class in 1983, receiving a degree in political science, with distinction.

Following a year at the Election and Survey Unit at CBS News, Eichenwald joined The New York Times in 1985 as a news clerk for Hedrick Smith, the paper's chief Washington correspondent.

Eichenwald had been employed by The New York Times since 1986 and primarily covered Wall Street and corporate topics such as insider trading, accounting scandals, and takeovers, but also wrote about a range of issues including terrorism, the Bill Clinton pardon controversy, federal health care policy, and sexual predators on the Internet.

When Smith began writing his book The Power Game, Eichenwald became his research assistant, leaving in 1986 to become associate editor at The National Journal in Washington.

During those years, he was a frequent contributor to The New York Times op-ed page, writing humorous pieces about political issues.

Eichenwald returned to The New York Times later in 1986 as a news clerk for the national desk in New York, participating in the paper's writing program for aspiring reporters.

By 1988, he had been named The New York Times’ Wall Street reporter.

His arrival on Wall Street coincided with the explosion of white-collar criminal investigations in finance.

He wrote about the stock trading scandals involving speculator Ivan Boesky and junk bond King Michael Milken, as well as the Treasury markets scandal at Salomon Brothers.

He also covered the excesses of the takeover era, including the biggest deal of the time, the acquisition of RJR Nabisco by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company.

In 1995, Eichenwald began writing about assorted corporate misdeeds.

He wrote a multi-part series for The New York Times, exposing significant deficiencies in the American business of providing kidney dialysis treatments.

The series led to a review by the Clinton Administration of ways to create financial incentives to improve quality in dialysis treatment, a focus of Eichenwald’s series.

The articles were honored in 1996 with a George Polk Award for excellence in journalism, the first of two that he was awarded.

After his dialysis series, he joined with Martin Gottlieb, a health reporter with the newspaper, in a multi-year investigation of Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corporation, which at the time was the largest health-care company in the world.

The investigation, which led to not only multiple articles in the paper and a criminal investigation of Columbia, but also significant changes in the way the federal government compensated hospitals, according to Bruce Vladek, then the head of the Medicare program.

An article in the magazine Content cited the work by Eichenwald, Gottlieb and two other reporters as the year’s best public-service journalism.

Eichenwald received his second Polk award, along with his colleagues, for this work.

In 1998, Eichenwald was attached to The New York Times’ senior reporter program.

He also teamed with another of the newspaper's reporters, Gina Kolata, for a multi-year investigation into how business interests affect the nation's system for medical research.

The articles explored drug and device testing, and pointed out how the interplay between insurance companies and the courts had prevented the testing of experimental procedures, including the use of bone-marrow transplants for the treatment of breast cancer.

The articles were credited with driving new policies by American insurance companies that allowed for reimbursement to participants in federally approved medical studies for the treatment of cancer.

Eichenwald and Kolata both were honored as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for their work.

With the explosion of corporate scandals in 2002 – Enron, WorldCom, Arthur Andersen, Tyco and others – Eichenwald reported on the unfolding scandals and becoming a television fixture on such programs as Charlie Rose and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer in explaining the meaning of the latest developments.

Eichenwald, along with several other New York Times reporters, was selected as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for his work on the corporate scandals.

In 2005, he wrote a group of New York Times articles about online child pornography.

One of those articles was about Justin Berry, a then-18-year-old who operated pornographic websites featuring himself and other teen males.

For this reporting, Eichenwald received the Payne Award for Ethics in Journalism for "preserving the editorial integrity of an important story while reaching out to assist his source, Justin Berry, in reporting on Berry’s involvement in child pornography."

Five months after publication of the article, Eichenwald and Berry both gave Congressional testimony about online child abuse before a subcommittee of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.