The Lever Celebrates Izzy Award: “We Just Won Something Huge”

by | Apr 3, 2023 | News

The Park Center for Independent Media recently announced that investigative news outlet The Lever, alongside three other recipients, won the 2023 Izzy Award “for outstanding achievement in independent media.” The Lever celebrated its win this weekend in its newsletter, offering a discounted subscription to the site.

“The award is especially significant because it is named after the closest thing we have to a patron saint: I.F. ‘Izzy’ Stone,” wrote the outlet, “the pioneering investigative journalist who exposed racial discrimination, McCarthyism, and government deception related to the Vietnam War in his influential newsletter I.F. Stone’s Weekly.”

In its award announcement, PCIM cited Lever senior editor Andrew Perez’s work from last year that followed the money behind Leonard Leo, the architect of the conservative supermajority in the Supreme Court. This four-part investigation exposed Chicago businessman Barre Seid’s $1.6 billion donation to Leo’s political advocacy nonprofit in the largest known dark money transfer in history.

As the Izzy judges had noted, “No news outlet is as thorough and relentless as The Lever in exposing the corrupting influence of corporate power on government and both major parties. From dark money influence on the Supreme Court to Medicare privatization to the dangers of deregulation to other topics, The Lever’s investigative team is on the corruption beat day after day.”

Two days prior to The Lever’s newsletter post, Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman announced this year’s Izzy winners on the outlet’s daily show. Goodman received the inaugural Izzy Award in 2009 for Democracy Now!’s cutting-edge broadcast featuring issues and experts rarely heard in corporate media. Watch Goodman announce this year’s award here:

The Lever said of its recognition, “It is a notable achievement to win such an auspicious honor less than three years after we launched. It’s true recognition of our unique, independent accountability journalism and its real-world impact. And, as we’ve proved with our recent groundbreaking coverage of the Norfolk Southern train derailment and the Silicon Valley Bank collapse, we’re just getting started.”

The Lever will be recognized alongside the three other recipients of the award at a ceremony in late April 2023.

 

More from The Edge

The New Long COVID is College Without Classes

I was punched in the gut. It hurt. I thought this would be the seminar session to bring all the theories and histories of documentary across analog and digital together with a big political and epistemological impact. But I should have summoned my semiotic training to...

Warhol, Art, and Capitalism Before the Supreme Court

The Andy Warhol Foundation has lost its suit against photographer Lynn Goldsmith. The Supreme Court’s May 18, 2023, ruling positioned the decision as a defense of lesser known artists against famous ones. The majority argued that Fair Use was not applicable when...

How Media Bias Twists Public Perception of the Writers’ Strike

Outside of the corporate offices and backlots of Netflix, Disney, NBC, Universal, and Warner Brothers, masses of protestors stand with signs that range from serious to hilarious, all with the same message: writers need to be fairly paid for their work. Corporate media...

Motherhood, Technology, and Natalia Almada’s “Users”

Natalia Almada’s documentary essay film “Users” (2021) questions a mother’s deep ambivalence about technology. But the film’s aesthetics makes clear that she has already chosen technology. The film is the binational Mexican American director’s first shot in the United...

Guilty of Sexual Abuse (But Not Rape?)

On Contemptuous Men and the Women who Fight Back A short note about the subtitle before I begin: it is interesting how these gender terms hold sometimes in all their simplicity and binary force. Other than the title, when I use the term woman/en it is inclusive of...

The Drifting Smoke of the Burned-Over District

South Butler, New York, is a forgotten byway in American history. Its moment of notoriety came and went. Now it is just a crossroad hamlet struggling to matter like so many other such places in rural America. But once it did matter. In the decades before the Civil...

Capturing the Latino Vote

The 2024 election season has begun. Candidates identify political and policy priorities. Voters constantly wonder where on the political spectrum the country will land. At the same time, a political messaging battle about voter turnout and possible voter suppression...