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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. It's award season in America. The Golden Globes were last month. The Grammys were Sunday night we talked about that. The Oscars are coming up next month. Okay, the Tony Awards aren't until June, but here's one that may not be on your radar, but is must-see TV and must-hear radio, and must-be print content in some cases, for many of you who care about what's happening in the world, as you probably do, if you listen to this show, it's the duPont–Columbia Journalism Awards, generally considered the most prestigious awards in journalism for radio and TV and other audio and video.

This year's winners were just announced yesterday, spanning topics and news organizations from CNN and PBS. They were both honored for the Ukraine war coverage to This American Life, an episode called Talking While Black we're going to play an excerpt from that, to reporting on many local news outlets like an investigative Story on KXAS TV in Dallas on the criminal underworld of those paper license plates. A KARE TV in Minneapolis story that followed the trial of violent criminals with severe mental illness who wind up back on the streets after being deemed incompetent to stand trial. Certainly could cover something like that in New York or other cities.

The WBRZ TV Baton Rouge investigation, revealing internal emails and leaked video of the death of an unarmed Black man in police custody and the deception by the department that followed. That certainly sounds like a movie we've seen too many times in too many cities too. With me now to represent the duPont–Columbia Journalism Awards is the dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Jelani Cobb, who as many of you know, is also in New Yorker Magazine staff writer. We hope to also touch on his own most recent articles, which deal with race in the police killing of Tyre Nichols and Ron DeSantis's power over the AP African-American studies course. Jelani or let me say, Dean Cobb, we always learn things when you come on, Dean so thanks for this and welcome back to WNYC.

Jelani Cobb: It's good to be with you again, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: You don't get the ratings of the Oscars. You don't have Stevie Wonder and Smokey Robinson and 50 years of hip hop icons performing live like at the Grammys so tell listeners-- [crosstalk]

Jelani Cobb: Next year.

Brian Lehrer: Maybe next year. Tell listeners who didn't see the award show last night, what are the duPont–Columbia Journalism Awards designed to honor.

Jelani Cobb: Well, the duPont–Columbia Journalism award is designed to honor the best achievements in broadcast and digital journalism. Just this year, we had a really exemplary spectrum of work that highlighted what these awards are really about. You mentioned the KXAS story from Dallas, about paper tags. It is such an amazing story, one that you would give any young aspiring journalist to see how something that seemed like a fairly routine story of the DMV being hacked, and people printing paper license plates, like those temporary plates that you get, people being able to print those out.

It seems like a 600-word story until you find out that these paper licenses were being auctioned off in the criminal underworld and then became an integral part of narco-trafficking and large-scale trafficking and were going from millions of dollars or generating millions of dollars. It really is one of those stories that exemplifies what happens when you just doggedly pursue something and find out where it takes you.

The coverage in Ukraine, the amazing documentary on Alexei Navalny that CNN films and HBO combined to do just an embarrassment of riches really. Nova did a really fascinating story on Arctic sinkholes and the fact that there is methane gas being generated by the rapidly melting permafrost and that this methane builds up and then culminates in these huge explosions that leave sinkholes behind. That's another factor that we have to think about in the course of climate change. We really had just a wonderful, amazing set of stories that we wanted to highlight and to recognize last night.

Brian Lehrer: You're running right ahead of me, because what I wanted to do anyway was start going down the list of some of these winners and have you described why they were honored so you've jumped voluntarily into that task.

Jelani Cobb: I have more.

Brian Lehrer: Well, we'll do more, we'll definitely do more but I want to ask you about the Ukraine war coverage awards. Every international news organization, certainly all the major networks where you cover, which is audio and video, radio and television, have been covering the war. You honored CNN and PBS in particular for the Ukraine reporting. Why those two?

Jelani Cobb: Well, I should also say that the decisions, these are the decisions of the jury. The jury highlighted for CNN, just the in-depth level of the coverage that they'd done, particularly around the exodus of millions of people leaving Ukraine and fleeing Ukraine, in the course of the early stages of the war. For PBS, a similar point was also paired with their coverage of the American withdrawal in Afghanistan. Some of the footage that they had was just astounding, of people who were lined up and, they were right there 40, 50 feet from Taliban fighters, which is the journalists in the camera reporters, the camera operators were there too, and they are firing weapons over their heads in order to intimidate them.

They stayed right there to get the stories of the people who were desperately trying to get out of the country as the Taliban was reasserting control. There was just a real commitment to making sure that the stories entailing danger to the reporters, and to the people who were there in support of the reporters and every part of the CNN personnel who were present. In the midst of that, they came back with some amazing stories. I think that the jury saw that as well.

Brian Lehrer: Tell us more about the Baton Rouge story. Can you do that? Because, like I said, it sounds tragically like a movie we've seen too many times. I guess we could go city-to-city, unfortunately, and find stories of unarmed Black men who die in police custody. Then there's deception, covering up with the police really did that in too few cases is then uncovered by getting access to emails and video. People may know about Memphis now, people obviously know about George Floyd, people in New York know about any number of cases here, but maybe a lot of people listening right now don't know about Baton Rouge.

Jelani Cobb: What happens, and I happen to be someone who's covered a lot of those stories is that those incidents are metabolized in a particular way, that it's very easy to bureaucratically cover up what happened. People cover their tracks and a wrongful death, a death that is a result of excessive use of force can just be bureaucratized in a way. In this instance, we found there was a motorist, a Black motorist who died, just a snippet of footage showing that he was assaulted or was being assaulted. Then the body cameras turned off.

What really stood out about this story was the work that WBRZ and particularly Chris Nakamoto did, in tracking down and piecing together the rest of that story, including getting audio dispatches between the officer and his supervisor. Getting the emails and the official documents that enabled them to pull together a story that culminated and that officer being removed from the force. That flat out would not have happened but for their story.

The other thought part of this is that they did this in a small local media market, with a small local media market organization, where there's quite a good deal of pressure to not report those kinds of stories. Despite that, they did and proceeded to shed light on what had happened in this incident. The jury recognized that rightfully I think.

Brian Lehrer: Another one and kind of related in a way, I mentioned the award for the public radio show This American Life for an episode called Talking While Black. You describe it as about Black Americans unexpectedly caught up in the backlash against Black Lives Matter. Of course, Black Lives Matter flourishes in response to incidents like we were just talking about in Baton Rouge. We pulled a short excerpt from that This American Life episode to give people a little sample. This is Emanuel Berry, who reports the story for This American Life. You'll talk more about it afterwards, but I believe in this clip, she's talking about a high school principal, who got fired for allegedly inserting critical race theory into his school, and she talks about an email that this principal sent.

Emanuel Berry: In a school district outside Dallas, Texas, Dr. James Whitfield had just been promoted to high school principal. The school's first Black principal, and he was watching everyone send out these emails, not just corporate brands, but also his peers, other educators, and administrators.

Dr. James Whitfield: I've been up pretty much all night, could not sleep. I woke up at 4:30 in the morning, and I said I have to craft something.

Emanuel Berry: His email started by talking about the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, and how these events have brought forth the familiar enemy of racism in America. Whitfield ends his email the way he ends many of his emails and messages, by telling people he loves them dearly, which is kind of who he is, approachable, warm, a beloved figure, a cardigan-wearing dad. People appreciated the email. Parents, teachers, and students wrote to say thank you. Some said they were ready to learn more. One parent mentioned how refreshing it was to see a school leader send out this kind of letter.

Brian Lehrer: A little bit of that This American Life episode. Jelani, want to talk about that clip in context.

Jelani Cobb: Sure. Just under three years ago, we saw that video of George Floyd's death, the excruciating, almost nine-minute-long video in which a police officer kneels with his knee on his neck for that entire duration. The shockwaves of that were tremendous in terms of the protests that we saw on the street and the commitments from generally apolitical commercial brands for racial justice, or the virtue signaling that we saw in a lot of social media.

In very short order, the language of critical race theory was used to galvanize a backlash and to create a social hysteria that really dwarfed the level of social concern we'd seen in the aftermath of George Floyd's death, and Talking While Black chronicles how that happened, and looks at what the implications have been and particularly an instance of this one principal was fired, but there are lots of other instances that we can look at around the country that are really barometers of how we move backward, how quickly we retreated from this commitment to racial justice. I think that was why that particular podcast was recognized with the duPont Award last night.

Brian Lehrer: The awards committee's notes on that episode say it included a Michigan teen shockingly sold by her white classmates in the virtual slave auction. What's the context for that?

Jelani Cobb: Horrific story where a biracial teen becomes aware that her classmates have on a social media app been making bids for a slave auction for how much they would buy or sell their Black or biracial classmates for. The student, of course, sees this as she should as a complete offense and is horrified and traumatized by it, but it really becomes a stand-in for this bigger problem that they're looking to trace.

Brian Lehrer: The backlash to the protests after the murder of George Floyd. Well, there folks are a few examples from Jelani Cobb, Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University from this year's duPont–Columbia Journalism award winners announced yesterday, there are more. I see that the award show is still available online, right, people can go to YouTube or something and watch it.

Jelani Cobb: It should be available online, you can also go to the duPont–Columbia website and see links to the stories. Also, by the way, there's one other story that I really want to make sure I've mentioned. That is the Audible story Finding Tamika, which was narrated by the actress and activist Erika Alexander. It really does an in-depth exploration of how it is that we have a tiered hierarchy in who we care about when they go missing and how Black women are very often at the bottom of that hierarchy. They use the instance of a woman named Tamika Huston, who disappeared in 2004, and her skeleton wasn't found until years later, as a lens for this bigger set of questions. I really encourage all of your listeners and you have a great erudite, curious audience that tunes into you, I really encourage everyone to check out these stories.

Brian Lehrer: That's great. We've got about 10 minutes left in the segment, and I'm going to ask you to put on your other two hats now, one as an educator, as Dean of the Journalism School at Columbia University, and then I want to talk a little bit about a couple of your latest articles in The New Yorker since you're a New Yorker staff writer as well. As Dean of the J School, how do you see the state of the field now? The news stories about news organizations, these days are so often about massive layoffs, but then you come up with all these examples, in the duPont–Columbia Journalism Awards, of amazing journalism, investigative reports, ongoing coverage of certain topics, all kinds of things that are really informing the public out there.

Jelani Cobb: Yes, I think that it's important to bear in mind. Something I always say to my students, two seemingly irreconcilable things can be true at the same time, which is that it is a very difficult time in the field. We see layoffs, and we see valuable and important institutions that are folding, because of the economic pressures that are on journalism right now. At the same time, it is nearly a golden era for journalism in terms of the caliber of the work that's being produced.

The late David Carr, who was a mentor to me, used to point this out. He said, "Not only are you able to tell stories and multiple platforms in multiple ways, but we generally walk around with more computing power in our pockets than previous generations of journalists could ever have dreamed of. You can research and record and interview people and broadcast and all these things, just on the basis of the phone that's in your pocket." We have data journalism that we can do because we have access to massive amounts of information that weren't publicly available, or at least not accessible to previous generations in earlier years.

There is amazing work being done in a number of different arenas, not just the large players, not just the New York Times and Washington Post and CNN, although there's certainly great work being done there, but as you see, if you look at that list of award ease, from the duPont Awards, that there is great work being done on the local level and in grassroots outlets and community outlets and nonprofits. I think that there's cause for optimism in terms of the caliber of the work that we see.

Brian Lehrer: That's two thoughts that I think we can hold in our minds at the same time, I hope so. How do you see the goal of journalism education, at least at Columbia, or maybe in general today? When I got a master's in journalism at Ohio State years ago, we all wanted to take courses that taught us how to do reporting. The professors kept reminding us that it was as much an academic degree as a vocational one, and we were required to study about the field of journalism, to understand its history and social context and impact and strengths, and weaknesses, as much as prepare ourselves for a career. Is that the same conversation that's going on today?

Jelani Cobb: On some level, I think. I also think that we're pretty clear. We're pretty straightforward as a reporting-oriented institution. Before I took this job as dean, I had a series of conversations with stakeholders and media, people who headed media organizations of various sizes and entities that hire some of our graduates, and so on. I really wanted to get a sense of what they were looking for. I anticipated really complicated, highly specific technical skills. What people came back to us with again and again and again, was reporting. I think that that will always be at the core of journalism education. How do you identify a story?

How do you track down sources for that story? How do you verify information related to that story? How do you get context and how do you convey that to the public and in an accurate and quick fashion? All of those things are core elements of journalism and therefore core elements of journalism education. In addition to that, there's lots of stuff that we're thinking about now. Digital forensics, which is an amazing growth area in terms of being able to understand if someone gives you a video that says is purportedly evidence of Russian troops committing war crimes in Ukraine, how do you know that it is what it purports to be?

How do you track down information that can verify that or disprove that? That's important. That's something that contemporary journalists have to think about that maybe older journalists did not in the same way. For journalism education, it's always going to be giving those cornerstones to skills. Then a little bit of the most contemporary applications for those cornerstone skills.

Brian Lehrer: Let me ask you briefly about your own recent reporting as a New Yorker staff writer. We'll have time to touch on at least one of your recent articles, hopefully, two. There's one where the headline is the Killing of Tyre Nichols, and the issue of race, and the subhead is the case dispatches several assumptions associated with police reform. Is this your take on the Memphis officers being five Black men?

Jelani Cobb: It is. What was difficult about that situation among the many things that were difficult was that in the conversations of reform and in the dialogues on police reform, there are few things that people anticipate making a difference. One of them is the diversification of police departments, which actually does make a difference. It doesn't make maybe the size of a difference that people would hope. When you diversify your police department, you do tend to have fewer of those egregious use of force problems.

The other one, which is a really big contributor is having officers who were college educated. The data on that is clear. College-educated cops are far less likely to use force than their non-college-educated peers.

Brian Lehrer: Were those officers, college-educated?

Jelani Cobb: At least three of them were and so they were Black, the motorist was Black and the majority of them were college educated or at least had some college education.

Brian Lehrer: The conclusion--

Jelani Cobb: It confounds our presumptions about what reform is supposed to do and what kinds of circumstances it will help prevent arising in the first place.

Brian Lehrer: To what degree do you think diversity on police forces does matter? I have been hearing other people, critics of the police put it in, let's say simpler terms than you just did, which is, oh, the race of any cop is cop, things like that. How much do you think diversity on police forces does matter and does it need to be cultivated in a certain way, the diversity for it to matter maximally?

Jelani Cobb: When people say that the race of any cop is cop, one translation of that is that culture is what matters most. The department culture will often triumph over the individual perspectives or the background of the officers themselves. That's not entirely shocking. When the Ferguson reports came out, there were two of them. We're going all the way back to 2014 when there was the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri that generated the Department of Justice Investigations. They've delivered two reports. One of them talked about the fact that the police department in Ferguson was overwhelmingly white.

There had been a racial dynamic with this overwhelmingly black community. In a footnote, they highlight that Black officers are slightly less likely to use force in those circumstances than their white counterparts are. It doesn't get you all the way to where you need to be. Then the bigger contextual issue is just the level of violence in American policing period. In any given year, between 1000 and 1200 people die at the hands of police. Many of those people unarmed. Majority, by the way, majority of those people are white.

Majority of those people who are white are killed by white police officers. That's another fact that we should be mindful of in that dialogue. Diversification helps, but we are not going to resolve this issue based on all the reporting that I've done and everything that I've seen in the almost 25 years I've been writing about this. We're not going to solve this problem without dealing with the wholesale issue of the level of violence that we see in American policing across all elements of the population.

Brian Lehrer: Jelani Cobb, New Yorker magazine, staff writer, dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and also here representing today the duPont–Columbia Journalism Awards which were announced last night, and which you can still see the award ceremony of online at the duPont–Columbia website. Obviously--

Jelani Cobb: duPont.org, by the way.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, thank you. duPont.org putting it right out there, so it's easy. Like I said at the beginning, Dean Cobb, we always learn a lot when you come on. Thanks, and please keep doing so.

Jelani Cobb: Thank you. It's great talking to you, Brian.

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