Best-selling author, journalist panel assess state of investigative journalism, 6:30 pm April 25

Best-selling author and American University professor Charles Lewis will introduce his multimedia project, "Investigating Power," at 6:30 p.m. April 25 in the Holeman Lounge.

The event will include a panel discussion of independent journalism featuring an investigative reporter and leaders of journalism advocacy organizations.

Lewis is executive producer of the project, founding executive editor of the Investigative Reporting Workshop and professor of journalism at American University.

He will moderate a panel featuring:

Bill Kovach, former Washington bureau chief of the New York Times and former editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He is also the former curator of the Nieman Foundation, co-founder of the Committee of Concerned Journalists and co-author of "The Elements of Journalism and two other books."

Dana Priest, author and national security reporter for the Washington Post. She has won two Pulitzer Prizes -- for her stories about secret CIA prisons and her stories, with Anne Hull, that exposed mistreatment of wounded veterans at Walter Reed Hospital.

Barry Sussman, editor of the Nieman Watchdog Project at Harvard University. He was the special Watergate editor at the Washington Post, overseeing the reporting of Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein and others> He is the author of "The Great Coverup" and two other books.

Lewis' “Investigating Power” multimedia project includes the observations and recollections of 23 important national journalists who have exposed the anti-Communist demagoguery of Senator Joseph McCarthy; the institutionalized racism in the South and the civil rights struggle; the misrepresentations and atrocities committed by the U.S. government during the Vietnam War; the wholesale abuses of power in the Watergate scandal; the various abuses of corporate power over many decades; and specific abuses of U.S. power in post-9/11 America.

For his newest book, "The Future of Truth: Power, the News Media and the Public’s Right to Know," Lewis has been researching the most mortally consequential deceptions by government and private industry, the origins and trajectories of public relations and propaganda and the truth-telling capacity of journalists and their news organizations over the past century.

In our new warp-speed world, the number of public relation specialists has doubled and the number of newspaper reporters and editors has decreased by more than a third over the past 20 years. Among the questions Lewis explores:

How can the American people know the real-time truth about those in power when independent, in-depth reporting has become rare?

What are the most important aspects of new media technologies, the emerging new nonprofit journalism ecosystem, citizen muckraking and the global right-to-know movement?

The April 25 program is sponsored by the National Press Club Journalism Institute. In addition to the Investigative Reporting Workshop, the project was supported by the Center for Public Integrity and its support organization, the Fund for Independence in Journalism.