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.

Investigative Reporting

“Leave No Trace” Director Irene Taylor on the Boy Scouts’ Hidden History

“I respect the Boy Scouts. I respect what they were founded on. But there was a really dark side and no one was talking about it.”

–Leave No Trace Director Irene Taylor

“Leave No Trace” is a 2023 duPont-Columbia Award winning documentary that exposes the stunning history of sexual abuse faced by over 80,000 young men and its subsequent cover up by The Boy Scouts of America. The film highlights the voices of six men and boys, who bravely share their stories and hold power to account. 

Director Irene Taylor talks about the relentless way her team took on an “All-American” institution and the sensitive way they approached its survivors.  

Arizona Law Enforcement Under Fire: ABC 15's Dave Biscobing

“I've seen officers lie in reports or stretching the truth - that's not new - but to entirely make something up completely and unequivocally, that just was really disturbing”.

- Dave Biscobing, ABC15 Chief Investigative Reporter

Dave Biscobing’s investigations of the Phoenix police department exposed both dishonest officers lying on the witness stand and outrageous accusations fabricated against Black Lives Matters protestors. Tune in to learn what he found, and how he found it.

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.

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”

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.

Radiolab's Latif Nasser on Finding "The Other Latif"

“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

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 Policing the Police: Jelani Cobb on Embedding with the Newark, NJ Police Department

This month On Assignment is revisiting a popular past episode with New Yorker Staff Writer Jelani Cobb, who teamed up with FRONTLINE to ask a simple question: Can a troubled police department be reformed? To get answers Cobb embedded with the gang unit of the Newark, New Jersey police department and spoke to officers, citizens, and city officials. Hear him and FRONTLINE producer James Jacoby in conversation with Professor Betsy West on the latest On Assignment podcast.

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.

Investigating the Military's Mental Health Crisis with NPR's Danny Zwerdling

We spoke to Daniel Zwerdling, NPR journalist extraordinaire, who has spent years reporting on veterans’ rights. He spoke to us about the parallels between journalism and psychology, his best interview techniques, reporting short news stories versus year-long investigations of the government.