The mission of the center is "to protect democracy and inspire change using investigative reporting that exposes betrayals of the public trust by powerful interests".

[10][11][12] By the late 1980s Lewis observed that fewer resources—time, money and space—were being invested in investigative reporting in the United States by established news outlets and major publications.

[13] In his book entitled 935 Lies: The Future of Truth and the Decline of America's Moral Integrity Lewis recounted how he recruited two trusted journalists, Alejandro Benes and Charles Piller—whom he had met through his television work— to serve on the board of directors of the nascent CPI.

[32] In November 2016, Bale resigned from the center to "pursue other international media opportunities" and John Dunbar assumed the role of chief executive officer.

According to the New York Times, this has created a situation of financial peril that "threatens to extinguish a newsroom of about 30 journalists that has watchdogged powerful institutions for decades.

[42] In July 2014, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation donated $2.8 million to CPI to launch a new project focused on state campaign finance.

[43][44] As of March 2024, CPI's board of directors includes co-chairs James A. Kiernan and Wesley Lowery, and members Richard Lobo, George Alvarez-Correa, Bruce Finzen, Jamaal Glenn, Olivier Kamanda, Jennifer 8.

Former board members include Elspeth Revere, Bill Kovach, Ninan Chacko, Arianna Huffington, Craig Newmark, Dan Emmett, Matthew Granade, Steve Kroft, Hendrik-Jan Laseur, Susan Loewenberg, Bevis Longsteth, Olivia Ma, Scott Siegler, Marianne Szegedy-Maszak, Christiane Amanpour, Sheila Coronel, and Molly Bingham, and Matt Thompson.

[50] In April 2016, the ICIJ made headlines worldwide with the announcement that it and the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung had received a leaked set of 11.5 million confidential documents from a secret source, created by the Panamanian corporate service provider Mossack Fonseca.

[51] The documents named the leaders of five countries — Argentina, Iceland, Saudi Arabia, Ukraine and the United Arab Emirates — as well as government officials, close relatives and close associates of various heads of government of more than 40 other countries, including Brazil, China, France, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Malta, Pakistan, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Syria and the United Kingdom.

According to Lewis, it "prompted a Justice Department ruling, a General Accounting Office report, a Congressional hearing, was cited by four presidential candidates in 1992 and was partly responsible for an executive order in January 1993 by President Clinton, placing a lifetime ban on foreign lobbying by White House trade officials.

[60] In 2003, CPI published Windfalls of War, a report arguing that campaign contributions to George W. Bush affected the allocation of reconstruction contracts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

[61] Slate ran a piece arguing that due to a statistically insignificant correlation coefficient between campaign donations and winning contracts, "CPI has no evidence to support its allegations.

[24] In their January 2005 publication entitled Pushing Prescriptions, CPI revealed that major pharmaceutical companies were the number one lobbyist in the United States spending $675 million over seven years on lobbying.

[74][75] CPI published a series of articles including "Toxic clout: how Washington works (badly)" and "How industry scientists stalled action on carcinogen.

The ICIJ partnered with the Guardian, BBC, Le Monde, The Washington Post, SonntagsZeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung and NDR to produce an investigative series on offshore banking.

[85] Kleiner revealed that according to the 2015 Center for American Homeless Veterans' tax returns, "it provided just $200 in grants to other organizations out of $2.5 million in overall expenditures, the vast majority of which paid telemarketers.

"[88] Outreach Calling collects money for "homeless veterans," "breast cancer survivors", "disabled police officers", and "children with leukemia", among others.

This left c. 10.3 percent or $12.2 million, for the non-profit charities and those they serve - homeless veterans, breast cancer survivors, disabled police officers, and children with leukemia.

In the United States, it is legal for for-profit telemarketers to keep 90% of the donations they solicit as long as they to not "mislead prospective donors" or "lie to them about how their contributions will be used", according to Jim Sheehan, "head of the charities bureau for the office of New York Attorney General Eric T.

[95] The investigation called the widespread successful use of these model bills spanning an eight-year period—which the report described as "fill-in-the-blank legislation"—amounts to "perhaps the largest unreported special-interest campaign in American politics.

[97] Writing in The Wall Street Journal in March 2005, commentator John Fund accused CPI of being a member of what he termed the "campaign finance lobby.

[98] Fund singled out CPI as a front group pushing Pew's agenda, arguing that "reporters are used to attempts to hoodwink officials into thinking an issue is genuinely popular, and they frequently expose them.

Our paid membership amounts to around six thousand people; we'd certainly be happy to have more... as for Mr. Fund, back in the days when campaign finance issues were of concern to him, he sought us out to lend authority to his writings on John Huang and quoted us in an Oct. 29, 1996, column on the subject.

Is it Mr. Fund's view that when he wrote about various DNC campaign finance violations, he was trying to hoodwink federal officials into thinking that people cared about the issue?In November 2010, CPI published a report on bluefin tuna overfishing entitled "Looting the Seas".

[103] The investigative methods used to produce the report became a point of contention within the organization when CPI employee John Solomon made a number of accusations against the team that had worked on the series.

CPI board member and former The New York Times Washington bureau chief Bill Kovach was asked by then-CPI president William Buzenberg to look into the matter.

Columbia Journalism Review reported: "As for the legality of using the password to access data, the lawyers concluded that, in theory, a prosecutor might argue it violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

[103] Andy Revkin of The New York Times wrote, "the relationship of the television production to a United Nations agency and an environmental group can prompt questions about objectivity, but the package, over all, appears robust.

[113][114] In 2011, CPI won a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism for their investigation of weak inspections endangering factory workers and surrounding communities.