Charles Lewis is an investigative journalist based in Washington D.C. Lewis founded The Center for Public Integrity and several other nonprofit organizations and is currently the executive editor of the Investigative Reporting Workshop at the American University School of Communication in D.C. He was an investigative producer for ABC News and the CBS news program 60 Minutes. He left 60 Minutes in 1989 and began the Center for Public Integrity, a non-partisan group which reports on political and government workings, from his home, growing it to a full-time staff of 40 people. When commenting on his move away from prime-time journalism, Lewis expressed his frustration that the most important issues of the day were not being reported. Lewis has given interviews for various publications and appeared in the 2003 documentary Orwell Rolls in His Grave and the 2005 documentary Why We Fight and others. He has discussed the difficulties facing media in trying keeping the public informed when television, newspaper and radio outlets are owned almost entirely by a few major corporations such as Comcast, Disney, and Rupert Murdoch'sNews Corporation. He was a Ferris Professor at Princeton University in 2005, a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard University in the spring of 2006, and is currently a tenured professor of journalism at American University in Washington, D.C. Lewis' 2014 book is He was awarded the I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence by Harvard's Nieman Foundation in 2018.
Center for Public Integrity
published roughly 300 investigative reports, including 14 books, from 1989 through 2004, and was honored more than 30 times by national journalism associations. In 1996, the New Yorker called CPI "the center for campaign scoops." That year Lewis and the Center published Fat Cat Hotel, a report which first revealed that the Clinton administration had been rewarding major donors with White House stays in the "Lincoln Bedroom." Weeks before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Center posted secret draft Patriot Act II legislation, and in October posted all of the known U.S. contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The report, Windfalls of War first identified that Halliburton had received the most money from those contracts, and won the first George Polk Award. In 2008, Lewis 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.
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists
Since 1992, Lewis has traveled and spoken publicly in 25 countries. In late 1997 he began the Center for Public Integrity's , the world's first working network of 100 reporters in 50 countries, producing content across borders, which made the Center's website the "first global website devoted to international exposés," according to The Encyclopedia of Journalism.
The Fund for Independence in Journalism
In 2003, Lewis was the founding president of the Fund for Independence in Journalism, a 509 nonprofit, tax exempt organization created to foster independent, high quality, public service journalism primarily by providing legal defense and endowment support to the Center for Public Integrity. He resigned at the end of 2008 and the organization went dormant, all of its assets given to the Center for Public Integrity.
In 1999, Lewis conceived the idea and in 2005 co-founded Global Integrity, an independent, nonprofit organization utilizing journalists and social scientists to track governance and corruption trends around the world.
Investigative Reporting Workshop
In the spring of 2008, Lewis, along with fellow American University professor Wendell Cochran, founded the Investigative Reporting Workshop, a project of American University School of Communication. A professional journalism center, the workshop conducts significant, multimedia investigative journalism projects on a national and international scale and has collaborated with many major media outlets, such as Frontline, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, NBC News, ABC News, BBC America and McClatchy Newspapers. Lewis is executive editor of the workshop.
Investigative News Network
In July 2009, Lewis co-founded the , a nonprofit consortium of over 90 nonprofit, non-partisan newsrooms around the country dedicated to investigative and public-service journalism.
Lewis was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1998. In 2004, PEN USA, a literary organization, awarded its First Amendment Award to him,"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 2009, The Encyclopedia of Journalism cited Lewis as "one of the 30 most notable investigative reporters in the U.S. since World War I. That same year, he was given an honorary degree by his alma mater the University of Delaware. In 2013, the University of Missouri awarded him its .
