Kurt Eichenwald ’83 is dedicated to uncovering corporate crime

Media Devils in the Details

Business is the only thing that’s really great to write about any more. It is the last area of society where there is power that can affect people’s lives for better or worse and can be largely unchecked. You are not going to have another Nixon or see the CIA run amok. Lots of people learned a lot from the ’60s and ’70s. The complexity of the business world has presented barriers to entry, Eichenwald says; often, this is “either because people don not understand it or because people don not pay attention.
He says he is not reflexively anti-business, but anti-crime, and that he is driven, in part, by knowledge that massive corporate crime has little victims: the elderly investors who lost all because of Prudential-Bache’s fraud in the 1980s or the struggling farmers who had to pay higher prices for feed additives because of ADM’s price-fixing schemes.
· The Informant: A True Story [Swarthmore]