For those who might have lost track of the well traveled New York Times correspondent Neil Lewis who spent nearly 25 years with the Times’, covering everything from the U.S. Supreme Court nominations, the U.S. Justice department , presidential campaigns, Apartheid in South Africa, to the detention of "enemy combatants" at Guantanamo Bay before taking a buyout in 2009, here is what he’s been up to.
In addition to teaching media law at Duke Law School, Lewis was a fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, serving as a recipient of the Horace W. Goldsmith Fellowship Award at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.
Since 2011, Lewis has been the executive director of a nongovernmental, nonpartisan task force investigating the U.S. treatment of detainees since 9/11. According to Lewis, the 13-member task force consists of two former federal judges, a former U.S. ambassadors to the UN, two former members of Congress, a former Under Secretary of State, a former FBI director, and two former generals who will issue a report in January, 2013.
Among other activities, Lewis was an international observer for Jordanian parliamentary elections and was part of a search committee for a new executive director of The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, a non- profit legal defense organization for journalists.
Despite a full plate of activities to keep him busy, Lewis still manages to write on issues near and dear to his heart. In the January/February (2012) issue of the Columbia Journalism Review he took a hard look at The New York Times’ coverage of Israel over the decades, how it's changed, while examining the sensitive issue of the fractious relationship of many Jews -- typically strong supporters of Israel -- to the Times, including an examination of the Times Sulzberger family's own sometimes ambiguous Jewish heritage. Lewis tells me his article sparked lots of reaction ``from both sides of the issue, and almost none of it friendly.’’
-Bill Lucey
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June 24, 2012