Lecture: Charles Lewis
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At age 35, working as a producer at 60 Minutes for industry legend Mike Wallace, Charles Lewis was on top of the world. At least, he should have been. Unsatisfied with the state of investigative journalism, Lewis did the unthinkable: He quit.
"Producers [at 60 Minutes] usually die or are fired, but a 35-year-old is probably going to be there for 20 to 30 years," said Lewis, in a October 14, 2004 talk with a group of students in the NYU journalism department. "I had smooth sailing if I wanted it, but I just couldn't handle it," he said, explaining that he was tired of squeezing stories into the show's morality-play narratives. "I had trouble shooting people tight, and waiting for them to cry, and good guys, bad guys, and the formulaic element of investigative reporting," said Lewis.
After leaving 60 Minutes, in 1988, Lewis felt directionless. In 1989, he started The Center for Public Integrity, a non-profit political watchdog organization. At first, Lewis ran the operation out of his house. "The whole idea was to do pure investigative journalism, to take as long as I wanted [to research a story], as many people as I wanted," he recalled. Since its inception, the Center has done about 300 investigative reports, produced 14 books, and been honored 29 times. "I think we're best known for power and politics," said Lewis, referring to the Center's popular series of books, The Buying of the President.
A new edition of The Buying of the President is published every four years, to accompany the presidential campaign. The series exposes the special-interest groups, whose contributions help underwrite candidates' bids for the presidency. For The Buying of the President 2004, the Center reporters interviewed over 600 people and identified a Top 10 list of big-money contributors to the presidential candidates. Center researchers trace the tangled web of a candidate's political connections. We "identify who [the candidates'] best friends in the world are, who their most generous patrons [are]," said Lewis. "[I]t's like a road map to everything about these characters that's not on their websites or in their campaign ads." According to Lewis, no other book, published before each election, investigates the candidates in such detail.
"Why, asks Charles Lewis, was his Center for Public Integrity—'a scrappy little pain-in-the-ass, non-profit, muckraking outfit,' in his words—the only media outlet investigating the government's Iraq contracts?"
A few days before Lewis appeared at NYU, the Center released a 12-page report called Outsourcing the Pentagon. Archived at publicintegrity.org, the report discloses all of the Pentagon's contracts within the past six years, worth $900 billion. In 737 of the biggest deals, 40% involved no bidding, according to the report.
The circumstances under which such lucrative contracts are assigned is "bad," said Lewis. "We tracked [over] $1.9 billion in...lobbying and several hundred million in [political] contributions and we identified all of these folks by name," said Lewis. In a nice bit of understatement, he added, "[T]he procurement process is not completely pristine." The Center research revealed that the Pentagon "does not know how many contractors they have, so of course they hired a contract company to tell them how many they have," said Lewis. "[It's a] huge public policy issue. It's not just about the pentagon; it's about public space, private space, the role of government [in] the 21st century."
In 2003, the Center investigated the assignment of government contracts in Iraq. "We had 20 people working for six months," said Lewis. "We filed 73 Freedom of Information Act Requests." The Center managed to get the famous—-or "infamous," as Lewis wryly dubbed it—-Halliburton contract declassified. A $7 billion, no-bid deal, the Halliburton contract was subsequently covered by The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and C-Span, among other news outlets.
Why, wondered Lewis, is "a scrappy little pain-in-the-ass, non-profit, muckraking outfit the one doing the Iraq contracts?" In the past 30 years, he claimed, no major media outlet "has looked at [government] contracts in a comprehensive way."
Lewis attributes the Center's investigative successes in this area to technology. The Center's six global reports relied on encryption technologies to move tens of thousands of highly sensitive documents around the world, within a far-flung network of journalists, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).
Of course, without the fierce dedication and well-honed investigative skills of the Center's researchers, this technology would count for nothing. Lewis launched the ICIJ in 1997. It includes what he believes are the world's best investigative reporters, covering issues whose impact goes beyond state or national borders. "We have identified 92 premiere investigative reporters in 48 countries...many of whom have been shot at, tortured, [had] relatives murdered," said Lewis. "A couple have been deported. One guy has been deported from two different countries."
Using encryption technology to distribute documents among Center journalists, the Center was able to expose a billion-dollar global tobacco-smuggling operation. The investigation began when the Center obtained internal tobacco documents from a warehouse in Guilford, England. The documents revealed that British America Tobacco was smuggling billions of dollars' worth of cigarettes into countries without paying customs. When there was a hearing about cigarette smuggling, said Lewis, British American would pretend to be shocked to learn that anyone was smuggling their product. In fact, they were using a third party to smuggle the product, he said.
"[We] circulated [the documents] around the world, [and] a journalist in Columbia...found the word for 'smuggle,' in Spanish, and cracked the code," said Lewis. "[She] actually had death threats and asked [that] her name not [appear] on the story when it was posted."
The Center broke the story in the form of a 5,000-word article, published on the Web, complete with links to original primary documents. Within 36 hours of the story going live, noted Lewis, three criminal investigations were launched in Britain, Argentina, and Brazil.
Heartened as he is by the Center's accomplishments, the veteran muckraker is troubled by what he sees as an American press that is less vigilant, less tenacious than it used to be. "Journalists are pulling back, not covering state legislatures like they used to, which is a problem because there were 42,000 laws enacted last year at the state level," said Lewis.
For example, healthcare insurance is a matter of state, not federal, legislation, he pointed out. According to Lewis, conflicts of interest are not uncommon: 41 of the 50 state legislatures are part time, which means a doctor might be sitting on a healthcare committee, a lawyer might be a member of the judiciary committee, and so on. Seven states don't even have conflict-of-interest laws, Lewis noted.
In running the facts of this story to ground, the Center’s reporters pulled financial disclosures for every state legislature in America, said Lewis. As well, they attempted to contact every state legislature in the country. Then they posted, to the Center's website, the records for the lobbyists associated with each state's legislature. Looking at the report, "you would have seen Enron deregulating itself a year or two before it hit a wall and declared bankruptcy and massive fraud," Lewis said.
Describing some of their labor-intensive projects as "masochistic" in their complexity, Lewis told the audience of NYU students and faculty "that the Center recently created "the only comprehensive, [searchable] database" of 527s and similar "outside political organizations." The result, he said, is that Center reporters now "have a way of getting all the data before anyone else."
Technology has allowed the Center to grow from an organization run out of Lewis's house to one with 40 employees, able to operate across borders, partnering up with journalists all over the world and piercing the veil of corporate and government secrecy in America and abroad.
"The power of the Web, the [ability to move] information around the world [and collaborate] with journalists in different cultures so you can interpret things" makes these exciting times for investigative reporting, said Lewis.
Then, too, there's plenty of muck to rake.