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.

Race

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. 

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”

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.

Director John Ridley and his team on uncovering the stories of the 1992 Los Angeles Uprising

“John really insisted on using the word “uprising.” Because as I'm keenly aware, based on my background, one person's riot is another person's uprising, depending on which side of the equation you're sitting.” - ABC News Producer Jeanmarie Condon on the language used in “Let it Fall: Los Angeles 1982-1992.”

This month’s On Assignment podcast revisits the deep reporting behind the 2018 duPont-Award winning documentary, linking the decade up to the Rodney King beating with the 1992 uprising that followed. Director John Ridley and ABC News Producers Jeanmarie Condon, Melia Patria and Fatima Curry discuss the film’s ongoing relevance as America faces a racial reckoning after the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others.