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.