Show Your Work: The 2021 Awards

News organizations are doing incredibly valuable work, almost entirely unappreciated by the public that benefits from them.

It’s awards season, and as usual I am flabbergasted by the enormous array of investigative work done by news reporters and how little the public realizes they benefit from them. Time after time, when there is a catastrophic failure of the system, a corrupt public official, a corporation doing terrible things in the name of profit, it only ends when a reporter shines the light of day on it.

Here is a mere sampling of the award-winning journalism that has been honored this year, with a few other pieces tossed in because they captured my attention. As you read, try not to skim. Try, instead, to imagine what the world would look like if there were no journalists to uncover these things, and whether that’s really a world in which you want to live.

And then consider subscribing to something.

• ProPublica conducted a major investigation into IRS records to reveal how billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Warren Buffett pay almost nothing in income taxes even though they made billions. The investigation was reprinted in major news outlets, including the New York Times and Washington Post, which Bezos owns but historically has not controlled in terms of content.