David Hammer Bio, Age, Height, WWL-TV, Net Worth, Salary, Parents, and Wife

David Hammer Career

Hammer works for WWL-TV Channel 4 in New Orleans, serving as an investigative reporter. He has been a professional journalist since 1997, joining the WWL-TV Eyewitness News family in New Orleans in 2012. Hammer has earned five Emmys over the course of his profession.  He earned in 2022 for his series “Losing Faith,” which uncovered a coverup of kid molestation charges against a priest from New Orleans by the Archdiocese of Military Services.

Hammer, a 7th-generation New Orleanian, joined WWL-TV following a 15-year profession as a print and wire reporter, including nearly six years at The Times-Picayune. He is proud of his New Orleans roots and makes it his task to help enhance his community by holding area leaders accountable and exposing abuse and fraud. At the newspaper, Hammer investigated retired New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, confronting Nagin about the journey he and his family took to Hawaii on a vendor’s dime, exposing countless of the criminal dealings that led to Nagin’s federal bribery conviction.

In addition to his investigations into local and state government, David broke several stories about key engineering decisions that contributed to the BP well blowout and led the newspaper’s investigation of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster. That work earned him the first award for the world’s best environmental beat reporting of 2010 from the Society of Environmental Journalists.

He was also a member of a team of journalists that earned the National Journalism Awards’ 2010 Edward J. Meeman Prize for environmental reporting. David also directed the paper’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina housing rescue, including the Road Home and hazard mitigation programs. His investigative reports exposed fraud and waste in state-run grant programs. He earned the AP regional honor for investigative reporting for his 2011 work exposing fraud and graft in Louisiana’s home-elevation grant program and several of the individuals he investigated ended up in federal prison.

A graduate of Harvard University, David’s previous journalism experience also includes four years with The Associated Press and five years spent working for newspapers in New England.

David Hammer Awards

Hammer also earned the Emmy in 2018 for his environmental series “Toxic Truth,” looking at air pollution in the so-called Cancer Alley between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.  In 2017, he also took home an Emmy for his investigation of illicit oil dumping in the Gulf of Mexico called “Oil and Water.” David was also a member of the Eyewitness Investigations team that earned the 2016 Emmy for a series on slow police response times called “NOPD: Call Waiting.”

The team also earned the 2016 national Scripps Howard Foundation Award for “NOPD: Call Waiting,” and the 2018 Associated Press Award for Best Documentary for their “Down the Drain” series on New Orleans’ drainage failures. Hammer also received the New Orleans Press Club’s top investigative reporting award in 2019 for “Toxic Truth” and that same honor in 2016 for his exclusive stories on trumpeter Irvin Mayfield spending public library donations on his jazz orchestra and lavish travel. Hammer also won  the 2014 Jim Metcalf Memorial Award, the Press Club’s award for the story of the year in New Orleans television news, for a multi-part investigation of gas operations and offshore oil named”Safety Last.”