“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.
“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.
“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.
“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”
“Any time you are dealing with an event that has so much scrutiny, the bar is really high. I think we all felt the pressure of, worrying about saying something that could be refuted. And so we really just focused on the visuals and what do the visual show, because that is kind of irrefutable.”
- 2021 duPont award winner Nadine Ajaka ofThe Washington Post on the challenges of reconstructing the violent clearing of Lafayette Square by federal officers.
“Thankfully, we were just so far ahead of the national media, because we got there first and we had people providing us with information, and we had already been working on it for a week straight. So we we were playing chess and they were playing checkers.” — Joe Bruno, WSOC Political Reporter
WSOC-TV political reporters Joe Bruno and Mike Stolp discuss their duPont Award winner - breaking an election tampering scandal in North Carolina’s Bladen County that dominated national headlines, and flags important questions about mail-in voting.
“Our democracy is imperfect. All of the problems that existed before this film still exist. But whether it's voting, volunteering on a campaign or in your community, to running for office, I hope people feel like there's a place for their voice in the democratic process.” — Rachel Lears
Award-winning director Rachel Lears discusses her prescient film Knock Down the House, which followed four women, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, running insurgent, grassroots campaigns.