The National Press Foundation will award Cox Media Group and KFF Health News the 2024 Feddie Award for their year-long investigation, “Social Security’s Secret,” which revealed that the Social Security Administration mistakenly overpaid millions of Americans and then reduced or suspended their checks even years later.
Their investigation was cited in a congressional hearing and ultimately led the SSA to revise their policies and restore benefits.
“This project humanized the consequences of a massive failure of federal bureaucracy and forced meaningful change. This series showed with powerful details and hard-won data how lives were shattered by widespread federal clawback polices,” NPF judges said.
The winners accepted the award at NPF’s Annual Awards Dinner on Feb. 20 in Washington, D.C.
The $5,000 Feddie Reporting Award was established by the National Press Foundation in 2010 to recognize outstanding reporting about the impact of federal laws and regulations on local communities.
Journalists from eight Cox Media Group TV stations and KFF Health News worked in collaboration to produce more than 150 stories. The journalists are Jodie Fleischer, Josh Wade, Samantha Manning, Alex Fruin and Jon Sonnheim of Cox Media Group; David Hilzenrath and Fred Clasen-Kelly of KFF Health News; Justin Gray and Leah Dunn of WSB; Ted Daniel and Christine Swartz of WFXT; John Bedell of WHIO, Amy Hudak of WPXI, Jesse Jones of KIRO, Shannon Butler of WFTV, Ben Becker of WJAX and Madison Carter of WSOC. Contributing photographers are Kevin Johnson, Ryan Minutello, Octavio Torres, Diar Gilyana, Dan King-Lopes, Erling Moe, David Chase and Jeff Williams.
“This is a great use of the entrants’ collective resources to show the scale of the problem, assembling local examples that may, on their own, look like unfortunate but mundane bureaucratic screw-ups. Instead, we see how an under-resourced federal agency has had profound effects on the lives of some of the most vulnerable people in the country,” NPF judges said.
Judges also recognized Matthew Dolan of the Detroit Free Press with an honorable mention for his “Failure to Fix” investigation into the nation’s vehicle safety recall system and the ease with which vehicles with known safety defects remain on the road endangering drivers.
Judges called it “a compelling story that weaves data with a tragic first-person element that makes it resonate with the reader.” Judges praised the tools allowing the public to check for potential defects themselves and especially the outreach to non-English speaking communities.
