He is best known as a two-time winner of the Sundance Grand Jury Prize, as well as multiple Emmy and Peabody Awards, for his films Why We Fight, Reagan, and The House I Live In.

His film Why We Fight about the role of America's military-industrial complex in leading the nation into the tragic quagmire of the Iraq War, won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize and a Peabody Award.

The next year, The House I Live In, his film about America's War on Drugs, won Jarecki a second Grand Jury Prize at Sundance as well as a second Peabody Award.

Achieving a level of mainstream recognition, the film's producers included Danny Glover, John Legend, Brad Pitt, and Russell Simmons.

[9][10] That same year, he also executive produced Laura Israel's feature documentary Don't Blink – Robert Frank about the late legendary photographer's work and career.

Nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Music Film, The King is a musical road trip in Elvis Presley's 1963 Rolls-Royce that features Alec Baldwin, Chuck D, Emmylou Harris, Mike Myers, Rosanne Cash, Van Jones, and Ethan Hawke, among others, tracing the rise and fall of Elvis as a metaphor for the country he left behind.

[11] In 2019, it was announced that Jarecki is returning to dramatic filmmaking with a yet-untitled action film about a Saharan, Tuareg nomad, who seeks revenge for a crime committed against his tribal customs.

[12] As a public intellectual on U.S. domestic and international policy, Jarecki has appeared on a variety of national television programs including The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Real Time with Bill Maher, Fox & Friends, and Charlie Rose.

He has been a visiting fellow at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies and is the author of The American Way of War (2008), published by Simon & Schuster/Free Press.

In The Guardian, Jarecki wrote, "Manning sees connections in the duty of the soldier who uncovers high crimes, to the death of secrecy in the digital age, to the role of the individual in a society where privacy is as besieged as sexual orientation.