“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”
“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.
“I remember my news director came to me and the weekend co-anchor and she said, ‘You know, I don't know that we'll get to this. But hypothetically, if we needed to broadcast from home, can we put a camera in your apartment?’”
WNBC News Anchor David Ushery on how the hypothetical became all too real, as he talks about covering the COVID pandemic in its early epicenter - New York, New York.
“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.
“It's a story of a guy who was locked in a room and the key was thrown away 20 years ago. This guy never got charged. He never got a trial. That is medieval. That is not a thing that should happen in a modern country, especially a country that prides itself on life, liberty and due process and justice.” - Radiolab’s Latif Nasser on his podcast series, The Other Latif