Christof Putzel has won two DuPont Awards and the Livingston Award for Young Journalists, an Overseas Press Club Award, and has been nominated for five News & Documentary Emmys. As an investigative journalist, he often uses FOIA (and the declassified documents it yields) to get to the bottom of many of his biggest stories. Putzel used declassified documents to expose an illegal U.S. weapons ring smuggling firearms across the border to the cartels in Mexico. He was the first American journalist to return to the Black Hawk Down crash site in Mogadishu, Somalia. And he's perhaps best known for his documentary Sex, Lies, and Cigarettes, which focused on Aldi "the Indonesia smoking baby" and shed light on Big Tobacco's marketing practices in developing nations. Putzel served as a senior correspondent for Al Jazeera America, a correspondent and producer for "Vanguard," Current TV's investigative documentary series and hosted a six-part documentary series about guns in America for online news outlet, AJ+.
Putzel is a third-generation news reporter. His father was the chief White House correspondent for the Associated Press during the 1970s, as well as a Vietnam correspondent, and his mother was a correspondent at Time magazine. His grandfather, Samuel Blackman, was the investigative reporter who broke the Lindbergh Baby case. In short, investigative journalism is in his blood. His work represents the best of American journalism, which is exactly what’s needed when searching for the truth behind the story.
