Investigative-Journalism

Multiple Pulitzer Prizes Awarded for Exposing Systematic Kleptocratic Corruption

| Importance: 6/10

Multiple Pulitzer Prize-winning investigations in 2025 documented systematic kleptocratic patterns. Reuters won for “boldly reported exposé” of systematic regulatory failures enabling widespread corruption. Wall Street Journal’s national reporting prize covered Elon Musk’s …

Reuters Wall Street Journal Boston Globe Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project Elon Musk +1 more pulitzer-prize investigative-journalism corruption-exposed regulatory-capture musk-putin +2 more
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ProPublica Reveals Alito's Undisclosed Alaska Trip with Billionaire Singer

| Importance: 9/10

ProPublica exposes Samuel Alito’s 2008 luxury Alaska fishing trip with hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer who later had business before the court, revealing potential judicial ethics violations and conflicts of interest. Alito preemptively disputes in WSJ op-ed, PBS News Hour provides …

ProPublica Samuel Alito Paul Singer Wall Street Journal Leonard Leo +1 more judicial-capture supreme-court investigative-journalism alito-scandal undisclosed-gifts +2 more
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ProPublica Exposes Two Decades of Undisclosed Thomas-Crow Gifts

| Importance: 10/10

ProPublica publishes investigation revealing Clarence Thomas accepted luxury trips and gifts from Harlan Crow for over 20 years without disclosure, triggering Supreme Court ethics crisis

ProPublica Clarence Thomas Harlan Crow Supreme Court judicial-capture supreme-court investigative-journalism ethics-scandal undisclosed-gifts +1 more
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FinCEN Files Reveal $2 Trillion in Suspicious Banking Transactions

| Importance: 9/10

On September 20, 2020, BuzzFeed News and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) published the FinCEN Files, exposing over $2 trillion in suspicious financial transactions between 1999 and 2017. The investigation, involving 2,657 leaked documents and 2,121 suspicious …

FinCEN BuzzFeed News International Consortium of Investigative Journalists Jason Leopold Deutsche Bank +7 more money-laundering banking financial-crime regulatory-failure suspicious-transactions +4 more
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New York Times Exposé Reveals Clearview AI's 3 Billion Photo Surveillance Database

| Importance: 9/10

New York Times journalist Kashmir Hill published a groundbreaking exposé titled “The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy As We Know It,” revealing that Clearview AI had scraped 3 billion faces from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo, and millions of other websites without anyone’s …

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Washington Post Investigation Reveals Trump Foundation Used for Self-Dealing and Business Settlements

| Importance: 9/10

Washington Post investigative reporter David Fahrenthold published a groundbreaking series of investigations revealing that the Donald J. Trump Foundation had engaged in a systematic pattern of illegal self-dealing, using tax-exempt charitable funds to purchase items for Trump’s personal use, …

Donald Trump Trump Foundation David Fahrenthold Washington Post Trump Foundation Charity Fraud Self-Dealing Investigative Journalism David Fahrenthold
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Panama Papers Expose Global Offshore Financial Networks

| Importance: 10/10

The Panama Papers was a groundbreaking investigative journalism project coordinated by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) in 2016. Based on 11.5 million leaked documents from Mossack Fonseca, a Panamanian law firm, the investigation exposed a complex global network of …

Mossack Fonseca Vladimir Putin Petro Poroshenko Nawaz Sharif King Salman +3 more panama-papers offshore-finance tax-avoidance shell-companies investigative-journalism +1 more
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InsideClimate News Launches

| Importance: 9/10

On September 16, 2015, InsideClimate News began publishing an eight-month investigation revealing that Exxon’s own scientists warned executives as early as 1977 that burning fossil fuels was heating the planet, yet the company then worked at the forefront of climate denial for decades. The …

InsideClimate News ExxonMobil Los Angeles Times Columbia University James Black climate-denial investigative-journalism exxonknew corporate-fraud fossil-fuels
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New York Times Exposes Total Information Awareness Surveillance Program, Sparking Public Outcry

| Importance: 9/10

The New York Times publishes an investigative piece by John Markoff exposing the full scope of the Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, a $240 million initiative that aims to create unprecedented mass surveillance capabilities by mining personal data from financial …

New York Times John Markoff DARPA John Poindexter Information Awareness Office +2 more surveillance privacy media investigative-journalism TIA +3 more
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