Charles Lewis Author and Journalist

Charles Lewis is a tenured professor of journalism and the founding executive editor of the Investigative Reporting Workshop at the American University School of Communication in Washington.

Since he proposed and began the Investigative Reporting Workshop, it has become the largest university-based journalism center (out of 17) in the United States and the only one in our nation’s capital. Since March 2009, more than 25 students, seven professors and several respected veteran journalists have collaborated to publish roughly 30 investigative news stories, almost always in partnership with major national news media organizations including three documentaries co-produced with the PBS program Frontline. To date, Investigative Reporting Workshop projects have won three national journalism awards.

But this is just the latest exciting chapter in the unusual career of Charles Lewis, who has been indefatigably investigating “the powers that be” for more than three decades. Over time, he has developed a national and even international reputation for initiating and completing unprecedented, extraordinarily ambitious major reporting projects involving sometimes dozens of researchers, reporters and editors, thousands of government and other primary documents and the latest multimedia, digital technologies. 

He has also become known as a social entrepreneur for creating new public spirited organizations. Besides founding and first leading the Center for Public Integrity in 1989, Lewis founded its International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in 1997, the first global network of premier journalists collaborating on projects across borders and oceans. He co-founded the Fund for Independence in Journalism in 2003, a legal defense and endowment support organization to the Center. He pioneered a new way to measure corruption in the world and co-founded Global Integrity in 2005. And in 2009, he co-founded the Investigative News Network, a network of 60 nonprofit news organizations throughout North America. In 2008, he was called “the godfather of nonprofit investigative journalism,” by Mark Glaser of the PBS MediaShift blog. Since 2007, Lewis has written 20 articles in various publications about the state and future of journalism.

A native of Newark, Delaware, he attended public schools and graduated from Newark High School, where he was elected junior class president and then student government president (2,000 students). Lewis, an Eagle Scout, was the first child on either side of his family to go to a four-year college. He earned a B.A. in political science with honors and distinction from the University of Delaware in 1975 and a master's degree from Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington in 1977. While an undergraduate, he began his first job in journalism at the age of 17, working nights in the sports department of the Wilmington (Delaware) News-Journal. Near the peak of the Watergate scandal and just months before President Richard Nixon’s resignation, in the spring semester of 1974, Lewis was an intern for Senator William V. Roth, Jr. (R-DE) in Washington.

In October 1977, Lewis was hired as an off-air investigative reporter (“reportorial producer” was the official title) by veteran correspondent and new ABC News Vice President Sander Vanocur, who had been hired by ABC News President Roone Arledge to start a Special Reporting Unit in the Washington bureau in the wake of Watergate. The unit didn’t last at the network but Lewis did – and over the next six and a half years, he investigated stories in 35 states and four foreign countries, and his “ABC News has learned” reporting appeared on ABC News World News Tonight, Nightline, 20/20 and other programs. In 1979, he worked closely with ABC News Washington bureau chief and correspondent Carl Bernstein.

In early 1984, Lewis was hired by CBS News as an investigative producer for senior correspondent Mike Wallace at 60 Minutes. Over the next nearly five years, his stories received two Writer’s Guild nominations and two Emmy nominations in the "Outstanding Investigative Reporting" category by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Most of his stories led the broadcast.

In late 1988, in the midst of a four-year contract, with a wife, a young daughter, a mortgage and no savings, Lewis abruptly quit 60 Minutes and within months, from his house, he began a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative reporting organization in Washington called the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan watchdog organization that investigates political influence, corruption and other ethics-related issues. Over the next 15 years, the Center grew to a full-time staff of 40 and an unprecedented International Consortium of Investigative Journalists network of roughly 100 premier investigative journalists in 50 countries on six continents, available on a contract basis, the Center under Lewis publishing approximately 300 investigative reports, including 14 books, its work honored by Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), and other national journalism organizations 35 times.

During this period, Lewis and the Center raised and spent $30 million on its wide-ranging programmatic work, utilizing more than 200 paid intern researchers, its findings or perspective appearing in roughly 10,000 news media stories. Unfettered by the normal time and space limitations that confront most traditional news organizations, the Center for Public Integrity is "the best known of the independent journalism initiatives" operating today, its work comparable to such legendary muckrakers as Lincoln Steffens and I.F. Stone, according to The Elements of Journalism (Crown 2001).

Lewis wrote or co-wrote several of the Center's studies and books that systematically track political influence, including The Buying of the President 2004 (Perennial 2004), on the New York Times short and extended bestseller list for three months, The Cheating of America (Morrow 2001), The Buying of the President 2000 (Avon 2000), The Buying of the Congress (Avon 1998) and The Buying of the President (Avon 1996).

PEN USA, the respected literary organization, gave its 2004 First Amendment award to Lewis, “for expanding the reach of investigative journalism, for his courage in going after a story regardless of whose toes he steps on, and for boldly exercising his freedom of speech and freedom of the press.” In 1998, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

From 1990 through 2004, Lewis conducted 35 news conferences at the National Press Club where he released the Center “findings,” many of them nationally televised on C-SPAN. National Journal once called Lewis and the Center a "watchdog in the corridors of power." The Chicago Tribune said that, "if Lewis didn't exist, somebody would have to invent him."

In 1996, The New Yorker called Lewis' organization the center for campaign scoops."
During that year's presidential election campaign, the Center repeatedly uncovered political information that resonated with millions of Americans. The Lincoln Bedroom scandal, for instance, in which hundreds of campaign contributors were rewarded with overnight stays at the Clinton White House, was broken by the Center in its publication, The Public i, earning it the Society of Professional Journalists' 1996 Sigma Delta Chi Award for Public Service in Newsletter Journalism.

Another Center report, Under the Influence II: The 1996 Presidential Candidates and Their Campaign Advisers caused a firestorm. At a news conference releasing it, just days before the New Hampshire primary, Lewis asked why the co-chairman of the Pat Buchanan campaign was involved with white supremacy groups such as Aryan Nations. Within an hour, Buchanan placed Pratt "on leave" from his presidential campaign.

Four years later, The Buying of the President 2000 first revealed that Enron was George W. Bush's top career patron. The Buying of the President quadrennial series which began in 1996 marked the only commercially-published, investigative book profiling the major presidential candidates and political parties in the U.S. and the special interests behind them – and released before any votes were cast in 1996, 2000 and 2004.

Just over a month before the March 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, Lewis obtained a 120-page leaked copy of the Justice Department's draft legislation "sequel" to the U.S.A. Patriot Act, and posted it on the Center's website, www.publicintegrity.org. Within five days, there were 350,000 unique visitors and 15 million hits on the Center website, and nearly 100 newspapers including the Washington Post and the New York Times published stories about the draft legislation. After the public uproar over some of its controversial provisions, the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003 died in Congress. The Village Voice called Lewis "the Paul Revere of our time."

In 2004, the Center received the George Polk Award for posting all of the major U.S. contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan online, and first revealing that Vice President Dick Cheney’s former company, Halliburton, and its subsidiaries had received by far the most money in contracts there. Approximately 20 researchers, writers and editors worked for six months following the U.S. invasion of Iraq, filing 73 Freedom of Information Act requests, the Center even successfully suing the State Department and Department of Defense to obtain the no-bid Halliburton contract. The Village Voice called Lewis "the Paul Revere of our time" in early 2003 after he obtained a copy of the Justice Department's draft legislation "sequel" to the U.S.A. Patriot Act, and posted it on the Center's Website, www.publicintegrity.org.

In 1996, The New Yorker called Lewis' organization the center for campaign scoops."
During that year's presidential election campaign, the Center repeatedly uncovered political information that resonated with millions of Americans. The Lincoln Bedroom scandal, for instance, in which hundreds of campaign contributors spent the night at the Clinton White House, was broken by the Center in its publication, The Public i, earning it the Society of Professional Journalists' 1996 Sigma Delta Chi Award for Public Service in Newsletter Journalism.

Another Center report, Under the Influence II: The 1996 Presidential Candidates and Their Campaign Advisers caused a firestorm. At a news conference releasing it, just days before the New Hampshire primary, Lewis asked why the co-chairman of the Pat Buchanan campaign was involved with white supremacy groups such as Aryan Nations. Within an hour, Buchanan placed Pratt "on leave" from his presidential campaign.

Four years later, The Buying of the President 2000 first revealed that Enron was George W. Bush's top career patron. The Buying of the President quadrennial series which began in 1996 marks the only commercially-published, investigative book profiling the major presidential candidates and political parties in the U.S. and the special interests behind them.

Lewis has been interviewed hundreds of times about corruption-related issues by the national and international news media. He has been a guest lecturer at on corruption or journalism at more than 25 respected colleges and universities and other institutions. Since 1992, Lewis has spoken publicly and/or gathered research in Argentina, the Bahamas, Belarus, Belize, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, Egypt, England, France, Hungary, India, Ireland, Italy, Jamaica, the Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Sweden, South Africa and Ukraine. In early 1997, he traveled to the troubled Ferghana Valley region of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia as part of a Council on Foreign Relations conflict-prevention fact-finding mission.

He was a Ferris Professor at Princeton University in 2005 and a paid consultant on access to information issues to the Carter Center. In the spring of 2006, he was a Shorenstein Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Over the years, Lewis has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Christian Science Monitor, Columbia Journalism Review, The Nation and many other publications. Since 2009, he has served on 13 Boards and Advisory Boards, including the Center for Public Integrity, the News Literacy Project, the Fund for Investigative Journalism, the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, the Investigative Newsource, the New England Center for Investigative Reporting, the Advisory Board of the International Reporting Project, the Advisory Board of the Sunlight Foundation, and as an "international associate" of the Open Democracy Advice Centre in Cape Town, South Africa. He is a member of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Investigative Reporters and Editors, the National Press Club, PEN USA and the Society of Professional Journalists.

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