“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'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.
“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.
“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.