Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
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?
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.
