Season 17
duPont-Columbia Awards
CNN's Jake Tapper with Dean Jelani Cobb

“The incentive structures in the worlds of politics and news media… are geared towards division and not just division, but demonizing people.  And it's very dangerous. It has already resulted in loss of life.”

-CNN’s Jake Tapper

Jake Tapper is the CNN Chief Washington Correspondent, anchor of The Lead with Jake Tapper, and co-host of the Sunday morning public affairs program State of the Union. In 2023, he was part of the team that won a duPont-Columbia award for their coverage of the conflict in Ukraine. He also hosted the awards at Columbia University in 2018.

In this episode, Tapper sits down with Columbia Journalism School’s Dean Jelani Cobb to reminisce about their longstanding friendship and talk about the extraordinary state of American politics. including how journalists should report on figures like Trump. 


Season 16
duPont-Columbia Awards
“Navalny”: Daniel Roher’s Real Life Political ...

“People are often surprised when they watch the film and they realize that it's sort of a dark comedy. It's a funny movie. He's a funny guy.”

“Navalny” follows Alexei Navalny, his team and his family as he investigates his own poisoning, and heads back to Russia to meet his fate. Director Daniel Roher explains how he built a relationship with Russia’s most prominent opposition leader.

Season 5
duPont-Columbia Awards
Michael Barbaro and Zoe Chace in Conversation ...

Zoe Chace of This American Life and Michael Barbaro of The Daily speak about the rewards and challenges of making stories for audio, the "tyranny of the good talker," and the sense of intimacy that comes from the voice alone.

Season 5
duPont-Columbia Awards
"I Felt Like a Filmmaker, Not Like a Refugee:" ...

“When we were in the back of a van crossing Hungary to Vienna, the driver was drunk and all the smugglers had AK-47s... and I remember my cousin looking at me like, I hope you're not filming. But I was secretly holding the camera.”

Exodus’ subject Hassan Akkad on filming himself, and Director James Bluemel on collecting these important stories.

Season 4
duPont-Columbia Awards
Death, Life and Writing: Director Vanessa Gould

"It struck me how quickly the facts of a life just start to immediately disappear when someone dies." OBIT director Vanessa Gould on why she was compelled to make her film.

Season 14

Ed Ou on his NBC News documentary about policing mental illness.

“I think it would be nice if this documentary was kind of like a road map for law enforcement to be the best versions of themselves as they can be.”

— Ed Ou, Co-Director "A Different Kind of Force: Policing Mental Illness”

In a candid conversation, video journalist Ed Ou reflects on his 2021 duPont Award-winning documentary, A Different Kind of Force—Policing Mental Illness, for which he embedded with a San Antonio police unit specifically geared to deal with mental health crises.

Ou discusses the ethics of covering the mentally ill, the challenge of telling stories with great moral complexity, and his own run in with police when he was assaulted covering a Minneapolis protest.

"Ear Hustle's" Earlonne Woods and Nigel Poor

“When a person goes to prison, the last image usually people have of them is in the courtroom... By the time we talk to a person it’s 15, 20 years later. And this is a totally different person.”

-- Ear Hustle co-creator, co-producer and co-host Earlonne Woods

Nigel Poor and Earlonne Woods reflect on their 2021 duPont-award winning project, “Ear Hustle,” a podcast series produced inside San Quentin State Prison in California. They discuss the project’s origins, the challenges of building trust and producing stories within a prison system, and their journalistic approach to telling difficult stories about complex and sometimes controversial subjects.

Isobel Yeung on her duPont Award-winning report “India Burning”

“I'm sometimes heartwarmed and sometimes I'm frustrated. Sometimes I'm reminded that, you know, the power of storytelling can be so amazing and that people really do care and people can empathize with cultures beyond their own. And then sometimes you see the frenzy of social media and what's going on in America and then you get really frustrated.“


VICE Senior Correspondent Isobel Yeung reflects on her 2021 duPont award-winning work, “India Burning.” She discusses the rise of anti-Muslim discrimination in India, the tension between spotlighting the oppressed and keeping them safe, and the broader challenge of making an American audience care about foreign news.

Nicole Newnham and Jim LeBrecht on their duPont Award-winning documentary Crip Camp

“Our lived, authentic experience is not only important... but it adds to the breadth of the kind of stories people are reading about. If we're a missing color in the landscape of journalism, it's just a little grayer without us.”

Crip Camp Directors Jim LeBrecht and Nicole Newnham discuss the importance of including unrecognized voices to the journalism landscape as they reflect on the six year challenge of melding dual roles as subject and filmmaker, of weaving civil rights history with human stories...and how Barack and Michelle Obama helped them figure it all out.