About the Author

Charles Lewis is a professor and the founding executive editor of the new Investigative Reporting Workshop at the American University School of Communication, in Washington, D.C. The Workshop has been established to do significant, original, national and international investigative reporting for multimedia publication or broadcast, and also serve as a laboratory “incubator” to develop new models for conducting and delivering investigative journalism.

A national investigative journalist for nearly 30 years, Lewis is a bestselling author who has founded or co-founded three nonprofit organizations in Washington, including the Center for Public Integrity. Lewis left a successful career as a producer for the CBS News program 60 Minutes and began the Center, which under his leadership published roughly 300 investigative reports, including 14 books, from 1989 through 2004, honored more than 30 times by national journalism organizations.

In 2008, he created, directed and co-authored The Iraq War Card, a 380,000-word chronology and analysis of the pre-war public rhetoric by leading members of the Bush administration, which identified 935 "false statements" about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. In 2003, in February the Center posted secret draft "Patriot II" legislation and in October posted all of the known U.S. contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Windfalls of War first identified that Halliburton had received the most money from those contracts, and won the George Polk Award. A co-author of five books, including national bestseller The Buying of the President 2004, Lewis was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1998 and received the PEN USA First Amendment award in 2004.

Since 2005 Lewis has served as president of the Fund for Independence in Journalism in Washington, an endowment and legal defense support organization for the Center for Public Integrity. He was a Ferris Professor at Princeton University in 2005, a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard University in the spring of 2006.

[For a more detailed biography, click here]