I'm not sure I understand how you can reconcile your concerns about Clark's ethics (which I share) with an appreciation for his post-Crisis fame and awards. It would seem to me that accepting awards for journalistic feats achieved through superhuman means (and reported, as you say, with less than total candor) would only make him less ethical. It's "cheating" as surely as if he used his superpowers to win at sports (which, come to think of it, is another indefensibly unethical thing he does post-Crisis).
It was always a bit bothersome to me that Clark used his abilities to beat out Lois (and countless other nameless reporters in Metropolis) to get good stories. Now, being in a newsroom makes perfect sense for a guy who wants to know about crises quickly and respond to them (although it became less important as Superman's powers increased to the point where he could monitor everything happening on Earth while lying in a hammock at the beach), but the flip side is that Clark benefits, rather unfairly, from being on the scene of every interesting event, everywhere. That is to say, I don't mind Superman using Clark as a way to learn about trouble, but I do mind Clark using Superman as a tool to report things no one else can.
Just to make things even more dubious, as you suggest, Clark ends up withholding all sorts of information when he finally files his stories. First off, he obviously doesn't mention how Superman was alerted to a danger or where he came from to get there. Then we can assume he leaves out other details that would (1) reveal his identity, (2) give future evildoers ideas for crimes or ways to hurt him, (3) confuse readers with super-scientific explanations of super-feats, (4) cause panic or alarm about ongoing or upcoming threats. Clark censors his own stories to the point where they're pretty bare bones, I'd imagine. Also any quotes he attributes to Superman from "interviews" are iffy at best. Yes, he could argue it's what he WOULD have said if asked, but he's really edging over into the realm of "fabrication" by suggesting a face-to-face that never happened.
In the pre-Crisis era, this sort of thing was occasionally worrisome, but generally you could ignore it. Superman needed his job at the Planet as a launching point for adventures, and when the adventure was over of course he had to file a story, since that's what he was sent to do at the start of the book. But post-Crisis it become very hard to ignore the question of ethics as Clark rises to prominence and celebrity from his stories. The only good thing to come out of that, perhaps, was making him a columnist, which would have freed up his time and made it less necessary for him to punch a time-clock and be at-the-ready whenever Perry had a job to hand out. Because what's never worked in any era was the idea of a guy disappearing from the office for long periods and not getting fired.
I don't necessarily have a problem with Clark being recognized for his novels, though. I look at novels as more a case of personal expression and creativity, things that come from within and aren't produced on a competitive, "I got here first" basis. it makes sense that with his unique experiences, his sensitive soul and his compassion for humanity that Clark would be a great writer of fiction.
On the other hand, if he's writing SF novels about alien civilizations he claims to have "imagined," when actually he's just basing them on real alien cultures he actually visited, well that's still cheating.