WWL Chief Investigative Reporter

Award-winning investigative reporter David Hammer has been a professional journalist since 1997, beginning first with the Times-Picayune and then joining the WWL-TV Eyewitness News team in New Orleans in 2012.

Mr. Hammer also has won seven Emmy Awards over the course of his career, the latest being in December 2025 for his hour-long documentary about his investigation with fellow T-P alum, Ramon Vargas at the Guardian, of serial pedophile priest Lawrence Hecker called “Losing Faith: Preying from the Pulpit.”  This was one of a part of the overall "Losing Faith" series with Mr. Vargas, in which they uncovered evidence of a massive clergy-abuse coverup by the Archdiocese of New Orleans, which series won the Society of Professional Journalist's Green Eyeshade award for the best TV investigation in the southeast US.

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.

While at the T-P 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.

A seventh generation New Orleanian, 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.