Charles Lewis is a professor of journalism at the American University School of Communication in Washington, D.C., and the founding executive editor of the Investigative Reporting Workshop. He has been a Ferris Professor at Princeton University, a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard University and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
Lewis, a former ABC News and CBS News “60 Minutes” producer, founded two Pulitzer Prize-winning nonprofit news organizations, the award-winning, nonprofit Center for Public Integrity (1989) and its International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (1997), the first global network of premier investigative reporters to develop and publish online multimedia exposés across borders. The ICIJ published the Panama Papers — the largest collaboration in the history of journalism, involving a leaked cache of 11.5 million financial records, analyzed and reported by more than 370 journalists in 76 countries and published in over 100 newspapers around the world.
Lewis is the author of “935 Lies: The Future of Truth and the Decline of America’s Moral Integrity” (2014), and co-author of five Center books: “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), a New York Times bestseller.
Lewis was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 1998, and in 2004, he was given the PEN USA 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 called him “one of the 30 most notable investigative reporters in the U.S. since World War I.” In 2014, the Wall Street Journal observed, “With the founding of the Center for Public Integrity in the 1980s, Charles Lewis probably did more than anyone else to launch institutional nonprofit journalism in America.”
In 2018, he was awarded the I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence.
Congratulations to Charles and his fellow 2022 NOESA Honorees! Please join us on March 23, 2022 at Army Navy Country Club for a celebration honoring the 2022 NOESA recipients. For more information visit, www.ncacbsa.org/noesa/.
