About the Author
Charles Lewis is a tenured professor of journalism at the American University School of Communication, in Washington, D.C., and the founding executive editor of the School’s Investigative Reporting Workshop. A former producer for ABC News and 60 Minutes, in 1989 Lewis founded the Center for Public Integrity, which under his 15-year leadership grew its full-time staff to 40 and published roughly 300 investigative reports, in the process winning scores of national journalism awards.
Since 1992, Lewis has spoken publicly in 25 countries on six continents. In late 1997, he began the Center for Public Integrity’s International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a pioneering network today of 185 premier reporters in over 60 countries to produce cross-border exposes. In 2005, Lewis co-founded Global Integrity, an independent, nonprofit organization utilizing journalists and social scientists to track governance and corruption trends around the world. And from 2005 through 2008, he served as founding president of the Fund for Independence in Journalism, an endowment and legal-defense support organization for the Center for Public Integrity. During that time, he also was a consultant on access to information issues to the Carter Center in Atlanta, a Ferris Professor at Princeton University, and a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard University.
Once described as “a watchdog in the corridors of power” by National Journal, Lewis was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 1998. And in 2004, PEN USA, the respected literary organization, gave him its First Amendment award “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.”
Lewis co-authored five books with Center for Public Integrity staff: The Buying of the President (1996), The Buying of the Congress (1998), The Buying of the President 2000, The Cheating of America (2001), and The Buying of the President 2004, which was a New York Times bestseller.
Lewis lives in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., with his wife, Pamela Gilbert, and their son, Gabriel. A more detailed biography is available at http://charles-lewis.com/bio-long/.
