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.

Narrative Reporting

Rachel Maddow and Michael Yarvitz on their 2020 duPont Award-winning podcast, Bag Man

“The reason the story was worth telling was not just to identify a Trump doppelgänger in history, but to really tell the story of the good guys…the people who did right…and made the system work.” -- Rachel Maddow

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.

Isabel Wilkerson on her Mark Lynton History Prize-Winning book "The Warmth of Other Suns."

When you spend 15 years on a story, you tend to get so close to your sources, they sometimes get jealous: “They felt as if I was in some ways cheating on them by talking with other people.” Lukas Prize winning author Isabel Wilkerson talks about how to navigate source relationships in her immersive book “The Warmth of Other Suns”.