Past Conferences

Information on Past Conferences in the Program

NGOs as Watchdogs
May 27, Chuck Lewis, The Fund for Independence in Journalism

A native of Newark, Delaware, Chuck 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.

Chuck Lewis is a bestselling author and founder and for 15 years was the first executive director 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 started the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan watchdog organization in Washington that investigates political influence, corruption and other ethics-related issues.

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 1996 (Avon 1996).

The Fund for Investigative Journalism was founded in 1969 by the late Philip M. Stern, a public-spirited philanthropist who devoted his life "to balancing the scales of justice," in the words of a friend.

Chuck Lewis is the current president of the Fund for Independence in Journalism in Washington. In 1998, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and in 2004 received the PEN USA First Amendment award.

Chuck Lewis opened his talk with a personal narrative that emphasized his frustrations working for different television stations and the disturbing observations he made of the chilling effect that corporate underwriting and advertising has on transparency, freedom, and, more generally, journalistic integrity. Mr. Lewis emphasized that when he began working, almost no one who ended up being active in NGOs set out to do so from the outset, though things have changed in the NGO realm since then. He cut his teeth working as a research intern for a Republican senator during the Watergate scandal for ABC News—the network that employed the Woodward and Bernstein team who broke the scandal. Lewis then was firmly influenced and grounded in the muckraking tradition from the beginning of his career—a sensibility that has stayed with him to the current day.

Lewis experienced a sort of breaking point in frustration with the media when he left one of the U.S. media’s most prestigious jobs as the producer of 60 Minutes in 1989 over disagreements about programming decisions that were being influenced by corporations. He believed, at the time, that "those in power need to be watched" and set out one his own to create an NGO that would allow him to do just that more effectively than the commercial media would allow. From a spare room in his house in Virginia, he set up the Center for Public Integrity (CPI). He named the organization, despite his reservations that it might sound pretentious, for the very thing he thought was most often missing in investigative journalism—integrity. Few journalism NGOs at that time existed, much less ones that focused on investigative journalism.

In its early years, CPI took in several million dollars as a consultant to stations like ABC and CBS and also relied on some labor union and corporate support, but Lewis and his colleagues soon realized that they were being compromised by such funding and have since relied on individual and foundation funding and the revenue stream from the bestseller success of the center’s "Buying of the American President" series. From one person with an idea to an initial corporate staff of three, CPI has grown in just over fifteen years into an NGO with international reach and influence of 40 staff members and over 200 paid researchers. It has also formed an international consortium composed of members of the cream of the investigative journalism crop around the world.

Among the high profile stories that CPI has broken are the Lincoln bedroom scandal during the Clinton presidency, in which political donors filled president Clinton’s political coffers in exchange for a night in the Lincoln room; the Enron support of candidate Bush in the 2000 election, for which the corporation earned political influence in the custom design of energy policy to suit its needs; and the revelation of a secret Patriot II Act that was being pushed through the White House without the knowledge or oversight of the U.S. Congress. The Patriot II Act, a far more repressive legislative package than its predecessor that was being touted by the Justice Department during John Ashcroft’s tenure under the aegis of national security, was to be sprung just as the Iraqi war was beginning in 2003 and forced through Congress as a key tool to achieve the country’s security goals. The CPI was asked by the Justice Department not to go public with the document—again, in the interests of national security—or the organization would face "embarrassment"—a veiled threat that never materialized. The CPI posted the document on the internet shortly after rejecting the request, and it quickly received some 350,000 different visitors and over 15,000,000 hits. The revelation had the effect of scuttling the repressive legislation before it was brought to the table.

The CPI also posted several U.S. corporate Iraq reconstruction contracts online, most notably Halliburton’s 7 billion dollar no-bid contract, raising important questions about war profiteering, conflicts of interest, accountability, and transparency. Recent CPI investigative activities have led to revelations about security outsourcing, connections between the corrupt former president of Ukraine Kuchma in his sanction-busting deals with Saddam Hussein, and the smuggling activities of cigarette companies.

An unfortunate reality in the field of investigative journalism, according to Lewis, is the threat of lawsuits. Those in power—be they from corporate or political realms—tend to have an endless well of both financial and legal resources to draw from. A suit brought against the CPI four years ago by a group of Russian oligarchs is still dragging on, draining the organization of valuable resources and energy. Many such suits are undertaken with the intention of squeezing NGOs financially and slowing them down, or even halting their activities permanently.

Lewis finished his talk on an optimistic note, claiming that the current trend points toward a larger role for NGOs in journalism. This has led to a growing "right-to-know" movement that, in turn, has led to the passage of laws granting greater access to information in more than fifty countries in the last ten years. The great irony in all of this—the last of Lewis’s many important caveats—is that the U.S., the country of sunshine laws and the Freedom of Information Act, is also the country witnessing one of the most striking rollbacks of information and press freedoms, a trend that Mr. Lewis and many other investigative journalists have done a yeoman’s job of slowing, and hopefully, reversing, for the sake of future generations in the U.S. and beyond.