CFA’s 2026 Betty Furness Consumer Media Honors

Your Credit History Could be Costing You More to Drive

In this compelling piece, NPR’s Robert Benincasa examines how insurers use credit history to set auto insurance premiums, often resulting in significantly higher costs for drivers with lower credit scores. The reporting highlights how this practice disproportionately impacts low-income consumers and communities of color, raising serious concerns about fairness and transparency in insurance pricing. The story identifies personal experiences and provides a state by state breakdown to underscore how systemic factors outside of a individual’s driving record can make essential insurance protection less affordable and deepen existing inequities.

Meta is Earning a Fortune on a Deluge of Fraudulent Ads, Internal Documents Show

In this explosive investigation, Jeff Horwitz of Reuters reveals how Meta has earned billions from a flood of fraudulent advertisements across its platforms. Internal documents show Meta projected that roughly 10% of its revenue, about $16 billion, would come from scam and illicit ads, with users exposed to an estimated 15 billion high-risk scam ads daily. The reporting highlights how Meta’s systems often allow suspicious advertisers to continue operating, sometimes charging them higher fees rather than removing these ads, while users who engage with scams are shown even more of them. By exposing how financial incentives can outweigh consumer safety, this story underscores the urgent need for stronger oversight and accountability to protect consumers from a rapidly expanding scam economy.

Instacart’s AI-Enabled Pricing Experiments May Be Inflating Your Grocery Bill

In this revealing investigation, Derek Kravitz of Consumer Reports, in collaboration with Groundwork Collaborative and More Perfect Union,  exposes how Instacart used artificial intelligence to test different prices on identical grocery items, often charging shoppers significantly different amounts for the same products at the same time. The analysis found price differences of up to 23 percent per item, with many consumers unknowingly enrolled in large-scale pricing experiments designed to gauge how much they are willing to pay. The reporting underscores how this lack of transparency and consistency makes it harder for consumers to budget for essential goods like food, raising serious concerns in a moment when grocery costs are already a top worry for many American households.

Wall Street Loots Federal Loans Meant for Affordable Housing

This sharp piece, by the The Lever’s Sam Pollak, published in Jacobin, shows how private equity firms are exploiting loopholes to tap billions in publicly supported funds from the Federal Home Loan Bank System, a government-sponsored enterprise originally established to encourage affordable mortgage lending. Using personal examples, the story highlights how private equity firms are acquiring insurance companies that are accessing Federal Home Loan Banks’ government-subsidized loans to invest in their own business portfolios, rather than in affordable housing.