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“…I am reporting the news so that when (my teenage kids)  look back in 20 or 30 years, they saw that I was telling the truth and covering it regardless of fear or favor.”

-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. A widely respected reporter in Washington D.C. for more than 20 years, he has been called “a staunch defender of facts in the Trump era” by the New York Times. In 2023, he was part of the team that won a duPont-Columbia award for their coverage of the conflict in Ukraine. 

In this episode, Tapper sits down with Columbia Journalism School’s Dean Jelani Cobb to discuss the current unprecedented state of American politics and how journalists can earn their audience’s trust. They debate this year’s controversial CNN Trump town hall, and CNN Chief International Anchor Christiane Amanpour’s stinging remarks about it at our May J School commencement. Tapper and Cobb reminisce about starting out together - before they were “respectable adults” - as journalists at a DC alt-weekly, and the tough lessons they both learned there that served their careers well.

You can watch The Lead with Jake Tapper here and his weekend State of the Union here. Want more? You can buy his new fiction thriller All The Demons Are Here here.