“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.
“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.
“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.
“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.
“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.
“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.