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.

Civil Rights

"Stolen's" Connie Walker on Her Personal Story with a Nationwide Reach.

“We all understand just how easily history is forgotten. And this history is being actively destroyed.” 

–Podcast Host Connie Walker

“Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s” is a 2023 duPont-winning series that uncovers the horrific abuse many young indigenous children–including the reporter’s own family–faced at a Canadian residential school.

Host and investigative journalist Connie Walker talks about the ethics of making public long buried stories of sexual abuse, highlighting indigenous voices and her own personal stake in this impactful podcast.

Erika Alexander on Finding Tamika

“They had told the story of how Tamika died, but not how she lived.”

—Podcast Producer Erika Alexander

“Finding Tamika” is the 2023 duPont-winning Audible series about Tamika Huston, a Black woman who went missing in 2004. The media paid scant attention, and she became a rallying cry for missing Black women and girls. But who was she outside of this tragedy? 

Podcast producer Erika Alexander tells us why finding the real Tamika behind the crime statistic is so important, and how journalists need to do a better job of telling these stories. 

Tracing Trauma With WNYC’s KalaLea

“There were literally holes in the newspaper...that related to what happened during the Tulsa Race Massacre. That just stuck with me. I remember thinking, I have to go look into this and see if that is reality.”

--- WNYC host and reporter KalaLea, “Blindspot: Tulsa Burning”

WNYC’s KalaLea talks about how her 2022 duPont Award-winning podcast series immerses listeners in the past, while threading the impact of generational trauma through to the present.

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.


Radiolab's Jad Abumrad and OSM's Shima Oliaee on Reporting “The Flag and the Fury”

“Mississippi is very particular. It's the state with the most lynchings. It's a state that just holds so much hurt, national hurt. And so the flag is symbolic of that, right, because this was the last state in the Union that had the Confederate emblem on their flag.”

Radiolab Host and producer, Jad Abumrad, on the history and meaning of the Mississippi state flag, the subject of the 2021 duPont-Award winning podcast episode “The Flag and the Fury”

Radiolab's Latif Nasser on Finding "The Other Latif"

“It's a story of a guy who was locked in a room and the key was thrown away 20 years ago. This guy never got charged. He never got a trial. That is medieval. That is not a thing that should happen in a modern country, especially a country that prides itself on life, liberty and due process and justice.” - Radiolab’s Latif Nasser on his podcast series, The Other Latif

Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Mark Whitaker on Reconstruction: America After the Civil War

“The greatest enemy of democracy is interference with the right to vote.” -- Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

On our latest episode of On Assignment, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. relates his 2020 duPont-winning documentary series Reconstruction: America After the Civil War to events of today with duPont juror Mark Whitaker.

Revisiting Policing the Police: Jelani Cobb on Embedding with the Newark, NJ Police Department

This month On Assignment is revisiting a popular past episode with New Yorker Staff Writer Jelani Cobb, who teamed up with FRONTLINE to ask a simple question: Can a troubled police department be reformed? To get answers Cobb embedded with the gang unit of the Newark, New Jersey police department and spoke to officers, citizens, and city officials. Hear him and FRONTLINE producer James Jacoby in conversation with Professor Betsy West on the latest On Assignment podcast.

Revisiting Nikole Hannah-Jones in Conversation with Lester Holt

“Most writing about race simply says ‘there's a disparity that exists.’ That's not news... What's much more important is the why and the how. And I don't think that we see nearly enough of that.” — Nikole Hannah Jones, NYT Magazine

A repeat of one of our most popular episodes: NBC News Anchor Lester Holt speaks with NYT Magazine reporter/writer and 2019 winner of the John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism about the convergance race and reporting.