Charles Lewis (journalist)

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Charles Lewis is a former 60 Minutes producer who left the ranks of commercial journalism to found, in 1989, the Center for Public Integrity, a non-partisan group which reports on political and government workings. When commenting on his move away from primetime journalism, Lewis expressed his frustration that the most important issues of the day were not being reported.

Lewis and the Center recently won the first George Polk Award for Internet Journalism for the piece "Windfalls of War."

Honored over 30 times in the last eight years, the Center has published 14 books including the recent "The Buying of the President 2004." Previously relying on its print newsletter, The Public, it now primarily focuses on the Web [1] to convey its investigative findings which extend to world-wide public policy journalism. Critics of the Center accuse it of partisan sympathies, but Lewis has pointed out that it had also reported on such topics as the Clinton's Lincoln Bedroom scandal as well as the latest string of controversies under the Bush administration.

Lewis has given interviews for various publications and has appeared in the 2003 documentary Orwell Rolls in His Grave, which focuses on the hidden mechanics of the media, its role as it should be and what it actually is, and how it shapes (to the point of almost controlling) U.S. politics. He has commented on the dismal state of U.S. political reporting which was and is woefully understaffed across the board. He also discussed the inability of media to fulfill its public duty in keeping the public informed when television, newspaper and radio outlets are owned almost entirely by a few major corporations such as General Electric, Disney, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation—and how the interests of these large conglomerates steer the route of what we believe to be "objective journalism" today.

He was also interviewed for the 2005 documentary Why We Fight by Eugene Jarecki, which focuses on the United States Military-industrial complex and on wars led by the U.S. over the last fifty years. In his statements, Lewis elaborates on Vice President Dick Cheney's involvement with Halliburton Energy Services resp. its subsidiary KBR, the privatization of war [2], war as a precursor for economic colonialism and "most of the government's decisions" being "substantially dictated by powerful corporate interest".