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.

Juveniles

Michael Rey and Oriana Zill de Granados of CBS News 60 Minutes Reporting on Family Separation at the US Mexico Border

“We were called to a meeting… in the basement of one of the government buildings in D.C.. We went in the backdoor so our visit wouldn't have shown up on any logs….” —- CBS News Producer Michael Rey on behind-the-scenes, under the radar reporting for the duPont Award winning 60 Minutes “On the Border” series.

This month On Assignment goes an inside look at the groundbreaking reporting in 60 Minutes’ two-part series “On the Border,” which explored family separation at the US/Mexico border. Producers Michael Rey and Oriana Zill de Granados discuss secret meetings with government sources, and what it was like to have a U.S. president criticize their work. They also talk about the challenges of remotely producing the news for television in the age of COVID-19.

Revisiting Caught: The Lives of Juvenile Justice

This month On Assignment is revisiting a popular past episode with Kai Wright and Kaari Pitkin of WNYC, creators of the podcast series “Caught: the Lives of Juvenile Justice.” The series gives young people in the juvenile justice system a chance to tell their stories, showing the human side of an often underreported part of the criminal justice system.

Directors Lindsey Seavert and Ben Garvin on their Emotional Doc “Love Them First”

“We've had two dozen theater screenings by now. It's mostly white audiences that really feel opened up to a world that they didn't know — people saying, I had no idea that’s six miles from my house, I didn't know that's what life was like there.” — Filmmaker Lindsey Seavert

Local Minneapolis reporters Lindsey Seavert and Ben Garvin became documentary filmmakers by taking their nightly news coverage of visionary principal Mauri Friestleben and the students of Lucy Laney Elementary and turning it into a duPont Award Winning Documentary, Love Them First.

WNYC's Kai Wright and Kaari Pitkin on kids caught in the system.

“The work we do as journalists on some level is exploitive. That is why then we have an ethical standard to not just be trying to entertain people…That is to me, horrific, because there has to be an actual meaningful reason why I'm doing it.” — WNYC “Caught” Host Kai Wright.

WNYC “Caught” Host Kai Wright and Sr Producer Kaari Pitkin talk about their award winning series on young people caught in the justice system, giving the mic to their subjects, and the challenges of reporting such a difficult topic.