About the Author

Charles Lewis is a bestselling author and investigative journalist who has founded or co-founded three nonprofit organizations based in Washington, including of the largest nonprofit investigative reporting organization in the world.

In late 1988, he quit a successful career as a producer for the CBS News program 60 Minutes and began the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan watchdog organization in Washington that investigates political influence, corruption and other ethics-related issues. With a full-time staff of 40 and an unprecedented network of 92 premier investigative journalists in 48 countries available on a contract basis, the Center under Lewis published more than 250 investigative reports, including 14 books, its work honored by Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), and others 35 times.

During this period, the Center raised and spent $30 million on its wide-ranging programmatic work, utilizing roughly 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 a recent book, 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 more than 30 news conferences at the National Press Club, many of them nationally televised. 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 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. 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 in Argentina, Belarus, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, Egypt, England, France, Hungary, Ireland, Jamaica, the Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Sweden and South Africa. 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. Since 2000, he has gathered book-related research in the Bahamas, Belize and India.

Lewis initiated several new, innovative Center projects. For example, in late 1997, he began the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), an unprecedented network of the world's premier investigative reporters collaborating to produce across-border, public service journalism on such subjects as cigarette smuggling by the major manufacturers, the human rights impact of U.S. military aid, private military companies, the privatization of water, and the politics of oil. In 1998, Lewis and the Center undertook a nationwide investigation of corruption in America's state legislatures, in which more than 7,000 state lawmakers were individually contacted by phone or mail, and their annual financial disclosure forms were posted on the Internet.

In 2001, he created a groundbreaking Center project to monitor and report on corruption, government accountability and openness around the world. In 2004, utilizing 200 respected social scientists and investigative reporters in 25 countries on six continents, the 750,000-word Global Integrity Report and The Corruption Notebooks were published and covered around the world. Lewis recommended and the Center Board agreed that the project ought to become a separate, new nonprofit organization, Global Integrity. That occurred in 2005, and he now serves on its Advisory Board.

For eleven years, from 1977 through 1988, Lewis did investigative reporting at ABC News and at CBS News as a producer for senior correspondent Mike Wallace at 60 Minutes. His stories twice received Emmy nominations in the "Outstanding Investigative Reporting" category by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. 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. He began his first job in journalism at the age of seventeen, working nights in the sports department of the Wilmington (Delaware) News-Journal.

He is president and CEO of the Fund for Independence in Journalism in Washington, which was created to foster quality investigative journalism, including as a support organization to the Center for Public Integrity. Lewis also serves on the board of the Fund for Investigative Journalism, 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. In 2005, Lewis was a paid consultant on access to information issues to the Carter Center in Atlanta.

Today Lewis is a Distinguished Journalist in Residence and professor of journalism at American University in Washington, D.C. He was a Ferris Professor at Princeton University in 2005, and a Shorenstein Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in 2006.

A native of Newark, Delaware, Lewis holds a master's degree from Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington and a B.A. in political science with honors and distinction from the University of Delaware.