CMG Investigative Reporting Wins Coveted 2025 Loeb Award for ‘Social Security’s Secret’

CMG Investigative Reporting Wins Coveted 2025 Loeb Award for 'Social Security's Secret'

Prestigious honor adds to the list of national accolades

ATLANTA - October 13, 2025 - Cox Media Group's Investigative Reporting and KFF Health News earned the prestigious 2025 Gerald Loeb Award in the Video category on October 9, adding to the list of national honors for their "Social Security's Secret" collaboration.

The Gerald Loeb Awards are among the highest honors in journalism, recognizing the work of journalists whose contributions illuminate the worlds of business, finance and the economy for readers and viewers worldwide.

"Social Security's Secret," a news special based on its investigative series "Overpayment Outrage," showed how a dozen reporters from across all of CMG's local television stations and KFF Health News worked together to expose the real-world impacts of Social Security Administration (SSA) overpayment clawbacks. It featured personal stories of more than three dozen people to highlight how burdensome the SSA's clawbacks had become for thousands of benefit recipients. "Social Security's Secret" aired on all of CMG's TV stations and on its streaming platforms.

"It's our privilege and responsibility to shed light on problems like these, which affect so many people in our local communities," said Jodie Fleischer, CMG's managing editor for investigative content and collaborations. "When our reporting encourages those in power to take action to improve the lives of millions of people, it just reaffirms our mission to protect consumers and positively impact the people and communities we serve."

As a result of CMG's reporting, the Social Security Administration announced sweeping policy changes to stop what SSA Commissioner Martin O'Malley called the "clawback cruelty" of withholding 100 percent of people's benefits to recoup overpayments.

"Sometimes it takes a crisis. Sometimes it takes an organization like yours lifting up a shortcoming for us to look at our data differently," said Social Security Commissioner Martin O'Malley during a March interview with CMG. "We couldn't allow this injustice to continue."

The agency has since restored benefits for many of the people featured in CMG and KFF's stories, plus many others. And in December 2024, Congress passed the Social Security Fairness Act to restore benefits for 3 million public sector workers and spouses. It was signed into law in January.

In addition to the Loeb Award, "Social Security's Secret" has been honored with the Edward R. Murrow Award for Network TV News Documentary, the National Press Foundation's 'Feddie Award,' and by the Center for Integrity in News Reporting with their inaugural 'Broadcast Reporting' Award.

CMG's prior reporting series, "Overpayment Outrage" produced by our eight local television stations in collaboration with KFF Health News, was honored as a 2024 Pulitzer Prize finalist for Public Service and has also been awarded with:

• Goldsmith Award Special Citation for Government Reporting
• National Headliner Award for Public Service (Broadcast TV)
• Barlett & Steele Gold Prize for Regional/Local Reporting
• SABEW (Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing) Best in Business Award
• AHCJ Award for Excellence in Health Care Journalism
• Society of Professional Journalists' D.C. Dateline Awards for Television Investigative Journalism, Online Investigative Journalism, and the Robert D.G. Lewis Watchdog Award for journalism that best protects the public from abuses of power