Charles Lewis is a veteran investigative reporter, a tenured professor of journalism and the founding executive editor of the Investigative Reporting Workshop at the American University in Washington, D.C. A former ABC News and CBS News 60 Minutes producer, Lewis founded and led the Center for Public Integrity, which published roughly 300 investigative stories, including 14 books, from 1989 through 2004, winning more than 30 national journalism awards. In 1997, he founded as a Center project the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the first global network of premier investigative reporters developing online multimedia exposés across borders that in 2016 published its 20th project, the “Panama Papers,” involving roughly 400 reporters and over 100 news organizations on six continents. The Center for Public Integrity and the now independent International Consortium of Investigative Journalists each won Pulitzer Prizes for their stories, in 2014 and 2017, respectively.

He is the author of 935 Lies: The Future of Truth and the Decline of America’s Moral Integrity (2014), and the co-author of five Center books including 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. In 1998, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and in 2004, PEN USA gave its 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 2018, he was awarded the I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence by the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University, in recognition of “his unceasing efforts to strengthen and support the work of investigative journalists in the U.S. and abroad.”