Public Talk by Award-Winning Investigative Journalist Charles Lewis

Distorting Democracy

Trumping Truth, Trust and Accountability

President Donald J. Trump’s utter disdain for truth and traditional adherence to at least some semblance of fact-based discourse and decorum is unprecedented in the history of the United States. According to the Washington Post, in his first seven months as president, Trump "made 1,094 false and misleading claims," which "averages nearly five claims a day."

How did a billionaire real estate developer and former reality TV star with zero experience in government at any level, a political neophyte, make it to the White House? The major U.S. television media largely created and hugely benefited financially from this bombastic, "You're fired" prime-time character both before and during his presidential campaign, giving him unprecedented "free" daily public exposure. Indeed, Trump benefited from $5.6 billion altogether during the entire 2016 campaign in "free earned media” – four times more than was raised and spent on behalf of his opponent Hillary Clinton.

Trump also has the most financial conflicts of interest of any president in U.S. history. He has refused to release his tax returns – even after he said he would during the campaign, and even though every elected president in the past 40 years has released theirs. Irrespective of his financial interests and entanglements, his daughter Ivanka’s and his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s, he and his family have refused to place his far-flung hotels, golf courses and other extensive business holdings throughout the world in a blind trust. He is the first U.S. president to arrogantly and defiantly refuse to conform to the "good government" conventions of the post-Watergate era.

As the internet and social media continue to diffuse public consensus, as hostile nations prey on democratic countries via thousands of unseen, online bots and other attempts to manipulate their elections, and as nation-state rule of law mores also continue to be undermined by 60-90 opaque offshore jurisdictions, and as media sensationalism, celebrity and "ratings" continue to trump substantive discourse, what are the implications for the future of democracy and accountability throughout the world?

Charles Lewis is an American investigative journalist, a former ABC News and CBS News 60 Minutes producer, a best-selling author or co-author of six books and the founder of two Pulitzer Prize-winning nonprofit news organizations, the Center for Public Integrity and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. Named as “one of the most notable investigative reporters in the U.S. since World War I” by the Encyclopedia of Journalism (2009), he has been a Ferris Professor at Princeton University, a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard University, and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. A MacArthur Fellow and past winner of the PEN USA First Amendment Award, he is the founding executive editor of the Investigative Reporting Workshop and a tenured professor at American University in Washington. His most recent book is 935 Lies: The Future of Truth and the Decline of America's Moral Integrity (2014).