“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”
“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
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.
“It really is just like a bunch of people thinking what would amuse us to put on the radio, and we're interested in the news and what's going on. And honestly it is not more sophisticated than that.” — This American Life Host/Producer Ira Glass
In our special 50th episode, find out what goes into the making of This American Life, one of the most listened to radio shows - one that spawned a generation of podcasts.
Bonus: Hear Ira’s sage advice from his speech to the Columbia Journalism School graduating class of 2018.
“The work we do as journalists on some level is exploitive. That is why then we have an ethical standard to not just be trying to entertain people…That is to me, horrific, because there has to be an actual meaningful reason why I'm doing it.” — WNYC “Caught” Host Kai Wright.
WNYC “Caught” Host Kai Wright and Sr Producer Kaari Pitkin talk about their award winning series on young people caught in the justice system, giving the mic to their subjects, and the challenges of reporting such a difficult topic.
“Going into Syria itself at the point where we started shooting was basically a suicide mission. Not so much the risks of combat, but the risk of being kidnapped, sold to ISIS and having your head cut off. So we were making a film about the Syrian civil war and we couldn't shoot in the Syrian civil war.”
“There's something spectacular about audio. There's something so intimate about being you know in between those two ears and it's it's been transformational for me... And we're just so lucky that audio happened at this moment when people were craving it. “
NYT The Daily’s Michael Barbaro talks about audio’s appeal with This American Life’s Zoe Chace in a conversation moderated by Prof Daniel Alarcon.