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 Revolution Starts at the Table

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. –James Baldwin   In November 2024, a New York Times headline declared, “Turkey, Stuffing and a Side of Politics.” Soon after, the Associated Press and CNN followed suit...

Finding Ourselves in the Days After Trump Wins

I thought Kamala Harris was going to win. I said, repeatedly, that I thought she would win the 2024 presidential election in a landslide. I found all the talk of a “close” election wrong-headed in overemphasizing polling and being anti-feminist. After all, her...

Manufacturing Outrage, One Pet at a Time

Disinformation, Hyper-Partisan Media, and the Perils of Big Tech   “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do, Dana [Bash],” Republican...

The Rise of Misogynoir Fascism

Pascism or Fatriarchy? We are fully in the throes of the 2024 Presidential Election. Kamala Harris says the present right-wing assault on our democracy must be stemmed. And Trump spits out authoritarian barbs and lies. A rising fascism is often named as our largest...

Rocking The Forest: Rockstadt Extreme Fest Pummels Romania

Nestled beneath lush pine forests of the Carpathian Mountains in the quaint Transylvanian town of Rasnov, Rockstadt Extreme Fest unleashed its tenth annual independent music festival, their website boasting, “The largest and most monumental heavy metal festival in...

Radicalize the Promise of Kamala

My purpose: to claim all possibilities for radicalizing Kamala Harris’s campaign to demand a ceasefire and not one more bomb, while making sure that Trump does not win. And to recognize how unique it is to see this band of warriors organizing around Harris as her...

No[n]Sense: Administrative Responses to Campus Protests

What happened on campus at University of Texas at Dallas on May 1, 2024 — and in its aftermath — makes no sense to me whatsoever. On that day, colleagues, students, community members and others were shackled and jailed. And while they were released within 24 hours,...

Op-Ed: Educators Are Not the Enemy

by Monica J. Casper, Meghan Eagen, Amy E. Farrell, Katherine Felter, Grace E. Howard, E. Goldblatt Hyatt, Erika Robb Larkins, Monica R. McLemore, Kyle J. Morgan, Kayti Protos, Stephanie Troutman Robbins, William Paul Simmons, Joseph Stramondo, Megan Thiele Strong,...