Award-winning investigative reporter David Hammer has been a professional journalist since 1997, joining the WWL-TV Eyewitness News team in New Orleans in 2012.
In 2024, Hammer's "Losing Faith" series with the Guardian's Ramon Antonio Vargas, in which they got a pedophile priest to confess on camera and uncovered evidence of a massive clergy-abuse coverup by the Archdiocese of New Orleans, won the Society of Professional Journalist's Green Eyeshade award for the best TV investigation in the southeast US.
Hammer also has won five Emmy Awards over the course of his career.
He won in 2022 for an earlier part of his "Losing Faith" series that exposed a coverup of child molestation, this time by the Archdiocese of Military Services.
He's also won three Environmental News Emmys: In 2020 for "Stench of Failure", an investigation of the Jefferson Parish Landfill; in 2018 for "Toxic Truth," looking at air pollution in the so-called Cancer Alley between New Orleans and Baton Rouge; and in 2017 for "Oil and Water," his investigation of illicit oil dumping in the Gulf of Mexico.
Hammer was also part of the WWL Investigations team that won the 2016 Emmy for a series on New Orleans' slowest-in-the-nation police response times called "NOPD: Call Waiting."
The team also won the 2018 Associated Press Award for best documentary for “Down the Drain” on New Orleans’ drainage failures, as well as the 2016 national Scripps Howard Foundation Award for “NOPD: Call Waiting.”
Hammer won nine New Orleans Press Club awards in 2023, including the top overall awards in both TV and print. He's won the club's top investigative reporting awards several times, including the best of TV overall in 2014.
Hammer, a seventh-generation New Orleanian, came to WWL-TV after a 15-year career as a print and wire reporter, including almost six years at The Times-Picayune. He is proud of his New Orleans heritage and makes it his mission to help improve his community by holding area leaders accountable and exposing fraud and abuse.
At the newspaper, Hammer won major national and international journalism awards for his coverage of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster in 2010. His stories about key engineering decisions that contributed to the BP well blowout won him first prize for the world's best environmental beat reporting of 2010 from the Society of Environmental Journalists. He was also part of a team of journalists at The Times-Picayune that won the National Journalism Awards' 2010 Edward J. Meeman Prize for environmental reporting, and The Associated Press Managing Editors' top regional news writing award.
He investigated former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, confronting Nagin about the trip he and his family took to Hawaii on a vendor's dime and exposing many of the criminal dealings that led to Nagin’s federal bribery conviction.
Hammer also led the paper's coverage of Hurricane Katrina housing recovery, including the Road Home and hazard mitigation programs. His investigative reports revealed fraud and waste in state-run grant programs. He won the AP regional award for investigative reporting for his 2011 work uncovering graft and fraud in Louisiana's home-elevation grant program and several of the people he investigated ended up in federal prison.
He then teamed with ProPublica and The Times-Picayune in 2022 to expose inequities in the Road Home and the elevation program that forced the state of Louisiana to drop unfair lawsuits against 3,500 families. Their reporting was also credited with helping convince the federal government and the state to finally end the Road Home program, 16 years after it started.
A graduate of Harvard University and New Orleans' Benjamin Franklin High School, Hammer's previous journalism experience also includes five years spent working for newspapers in New England and four years with The Associated Press.
Contact David at dhammer@wwltv.com and follow him on Twitter and Instagram @DavidHammerWWL and on Facebook.
