UD alum discusses state of American news media

Charles Lewis, a UD graduate and former director of the Center for Public Integrity

5 p.m., March 18, 2005--The news media is not providing Americans with the information they need to seriously question the decisions made by political and corporate leaders, and the situation may only be getting worse, according to Charles Lewis, a UD graduate and former director of the Center for Public Integrity.

Lewis made his remarks during his talk, “The End of Truth: Power, the News Media and the People’s Right to Know,” on Wednesday, March 16, in Gore Hall, as part of the spring Du Pont Scholar Lecture Series.

The Newark High School alumnus, who graduated from UD in 1975 with honors and distinction, was introduced by James R. Soles, Alumni Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Political Science and International Relations, who mentored Lewis during his undergraduate days at UD.

“Mr. Lewis left a fine job with 60 Minutes and took off on his own because he was dissatisfied with the American news media,” Soles said. “I can remember when the Center for Public Integrity was something that Chuck carried in his briefcase.”

A nonpartisan government watchdog organization based in Washington, D.C., the Center for Public Integrity was founded by Lewis in 1990, after an 11-year career as an investigative reporter and producer for CBS-TV’s 60 Minutes.

Drawing on his experience with the Center for Public Integrity, where he and his staff completed 300 reports and published 14 books in the last 15 years, Lewis said he feels that for a variety of reasons, the news media is not providing the public with the information it needs to make responsible decisions and ask the right questions of government at all levels.

“The media have abdicated their truth-telling role in our society,” Lewis said. “They also are facing a disconcerted, apathetic, disengaged public.”

Lewis said that with more information than ever being available, the news media is doing an inadequate job of gathering, analyzing and presenting the facts to the American public.

Part of the problem, Lewis said, is that networks have gradually decreased the amount of resources they devote to investigative reporting.

“When I was at 60 Minutes, one quarter of the news division was fired, and this has continued. The network news departments are just hollowed versions of what they used to be,” Lewis said. “Most journalists have quit or abandoned their profession because they cannot do their jobs anymore.”

Lewis also said that government has become increasingly restrictive in giving reporters access to information about subjects that could seriously affect the lives of all its citizens.

Lewis: “The media have abdicated their truth-telling role in our society.”

“There have been 300 rollbacks of Freedom of Information Act requests, and dozens of journalists have been arrested,” Lewis said. “And, for the first time, the press has been restricted from access to all presidential papers.”

The result of what appears to be a government-sanctioned policy of restricting access to reporters on several fronts, Lewis said, has resulted in lack of comprehensive information on subjects ranging from the awarding of government contracts in Iraq to the secretive attempts to pass a bill that many fear would further erode the civil liberties of most Americans.

“The Center for Public Integrity obtained a secret document that would have become the Patriot Act II of 2003,” Lewis said. “I had the sense that what I was looking at was really something special.”

Lewis said his suspicions were confirmed when the center called the U.S. Justice Department asking for comments about the story they were about to publish.

“The first response was ‘We have no idea what you are talking about,’” Lewis said. “The second response, from someone higher up in the Justice Department, was that ‘It would be a mistake to publish the report.’”

The Center for Public Integrity went ahead and published the report, and the web site on which the story appeared had more than 15 million hits, Lewis said.

“They said it was a draft memo, when it really was a 130-page document,” Lewis said. “The people who were the most angry were the Republicans [in Congress] who had worked on it. This shows you what people will do to keep things like this from coming out.”

Lewis, who resigned in January as executive director of the center, will continue to serve on the organization’s board of directors and will teach a class on investigative reporting at Princeton University during the fall 2005 semester.

The Du Pont Scholars Lecture Series is cosponsored by the Unidel Foundation and the University Honors Program.

Article by Jerry Rhodes
Photos by Duane Perry

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