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.

duPont-Columbia Winner

Director Malachy Browne on the January 6th “Day of Rage”

“We understood the magnitude of the event fairly early on and the need to start collecting evidence…That's how we think of this. As evidence, not just cover or B-roll.”

— New York Times Visual Investigations Lead Malachy Browne on the January 6 Capitol riots.

“Day of Rage” is a New York Times visual investigation of the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. Co-director Malachy Browne explains what it was like to organize and dissect thousands of hours of footage from “one of the most documented acts of political violence ever.”


Revisiting Ira Glass Behind the Scenes at This American Life

In 2019, This American Life founder, host, and producer Ira Glass gave his special brand of insight into how he crafts “This American Life,” from story inception, to reporting, writing, and production. We revisit his preeminent editorial style that paved the way for generations of narrative docu-style podcasters.

Director Loira Limbal’s Heartfelt Homage to Working Mothers

“I felt like I don't have to tell you how brutal racial capitalism is in the United States if I am showing you. I wanted capitalism to indict itself in the film.”

--- director and producer Loira Limbal

In her 2022 duPont Award-winning documentary “Through the Night,” filmmaker Loira Limbal intimately captured the burdens on working mothers and puts a mirror to America’s daycare system, reflecting back the darker sides of capitalism.

Nanfu Wang’s Brave COVID Doc Draws Dramatic Parallels

“Finding people who praise the government is easy. Finding people who are critical of the government is easy. What is the most difficult is convincing some people who are ordinary citizens who have information to come out and speak up. ”

--- director and producer Nanfu Wang

Filmmaker Nanfu Wang assumed a risk few dared during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in China. In her 2022 duPont Award-winning documentary, “In the Same Breath,” Wang and her team take their cameras into Wuhan’s hospitals to reveal the disparities between the devastating reality of the pandemic versus the rosy depiction Chinese officials painted for the masses. She details the logistical and emotional difficulties of creating such a film inside an authoritarian country on strict crackdown against freedom of speech – all amid a deadly pandemic.

CBS News Anchor Norah O’Donnell On Her Toughest Story Yet: Sexual Assault in the U.S. Military

“For those of us that are in civilian life, if you were a victim of abuse or harassment, you would go to the police, right? In the military, it's handled internally…it's like a family. It's very difficult for the commander who is a parent to then want to kick a child out of the military for something they've done.”

--- CBS News Managing Editor and Anchor Norah O’Donnell

CBS News Anchor, reporter, and editor Norah O’Donnell exposes gross mishandling of sexual assault cases inside the U.S. military, in her 2022 duPont-Columbia award-winning broadcast, “Military Sexual Assault.”

Speaking to families of victims, government officials, and dozens of victims, she sheds a damning light on the abuse the military tried to keep quiet.

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.

NPR’s Laura Sullivan Talks Trash

“The most important thing that people need to understand when they're looking at plastic is that it is trash. It is not valuable. It cannot and will not be turned into something new without great expense that nobody's going to pay for.”

--- NPR correspondent Laura Sullivan, “Waste Land”

Reporting for NPR’s Planet Money, investigative correspondent Laura Sullivan found herself sifting through boxes of decades-old archives, and stumbled upon 50-year-old oil and gas industry trade notes. They led her to one compelling central source – a regretful oil “big whig” – and down a reporting path about the damning history and the questionable future of plastic recycling.

Ed Ou on his NBC News documentary about policing mental illness.

“I think it would be nice if this documentary was kind of like a road map for law enforcement to be the best versions of themselves as they can be.”

— Ed Ou, Co-Director "A Different Kind of Force: Policing Mental Illness”

In a candid conversation, video journalist Ed Ou reflects on his 2021 duPont Award-winning documentary, A Different Kind of Force—Policing Mental Illness, for which he embedded with a San Antonio police unit specifically geared to deal with mental health crises.

Ou discusses the ethics of covering the mentally ill, the challenge of telling stories with great moral complexity, and his own run in with police when he was assaulted covering a Minneapolis protest.

"Ear Hustle's" Earlonne Woods and Nigel Poor

“When a person goes to prison, the last image usually people have of them is in the courtroom... By the time we talk to a person it’s 15, 20 years later. And this is a totally different person.”

-- Ear Hustle co-creator, co-producer and co-host Earlonne Woods

Nigel Poor and Earlonne Woods reflect on their 2021 duPont-award winning project, “Ear Hustle,” a podcast series produced inside San Quentin State Prison in California. They discuss the project’s origins, the challenges of building trust and producing stories within a prison system, and their journalistic approach to telling difficult stories about complex and sometimes controversial subjects.

Isobel Yeung on her duPont Award-winning report “India Burning”

“I'm sometimes heartwarmed and sometimes I'm frustrated. Sometimes I'm reminded that, you know, the power of storytelling can be so amazing and that people really do care and people can empathize with cultures beyond their own. And then sometimes you see the frenzy of social media and what's going on in America and then you get really frustrated.“


VICE Senior Correspondent Isobel Yeung reflects on her 2021 duPont award-winning work, “India Burning.” She discusses the rise of anti-Muslim discrimination in India, the tension between spotlighting the oppressed and keeping them safe, and the broader challenge of making an American audience care about foreign news.

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.


KSTP News Director Kirk Varner On Covering George Floyd’s Murder and a Summer of Protest

“She began to describe what was on the clip. And the first question was, are we going to put video on the air of someone being killed? That's obviously a very bright line, editorial decision that you don't make every day. And normally we wouldn't. But to understand the sequence of events and what happened, you needed to see all of it”

- KSTP News Director, Kirk Varner describing the 5am phone call that alerted him to the video of George Floyd’s murder.

The Washington Post's Nadine Ajaka on the Value of Visual Forensics

“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.

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

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.

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.

Investigative Reporter Charlie Specht on Cultivating Sources and Interviewing Victims of Abuse

“That is a holy thing to do - to come forward. I think the verse goes, ‘Thou shall see the truth and the truth shall set you free.’” - Charlie Specht, Chief Investigator, WKBW Buffalo

Specht was dubbed “the source whisperer” by his primary whistleblower. In this episode of On Assignment, he tells how he worked with sources for his 2020 duPont Award-winning reporting on the Buffalo diocese, Fall From Grace: When Priests Prey and Bishops Betray, which uncovered years of mishandled abuse cases and led to the resignation of Bishop Richard Malone.

CNN Chief International Correspondent Clarissa Ward on Covering Crises

“When you're starting out, you feel a sort of invincibility and there is an arrogance that comes with with real youth and inexperience…The more really dangerous situations I have been in, the more cognizant I am of the fact that life is very precious and that death is not something to be trifled with.” — CNN’s Clarissa Ward

Clarissa Ward’s reporting from global hotspots – Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen among many others – has won her two duPont-Columbia silver batons. She joined duPont Awards Director, Lisa R. Cohen for a very personal conversation about covering crises, COVID related reporting challenges, and career tips for young journalists.