Jonathan Karl's Biography
Chief Washington Correspondent
— -- Jonathan Karl is ABC News chief Washington correspondent and co-anchor of This Week with George Stephanopoulos.
The former president of the White House Correspondents' Association, Karl served as ABC's Chief White House Correspondent from 2012 to 2021. He is the author of two New York Times bestsellers on the Trump White House -- "Front Row at the Trump Show" and "Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show."
Karl has broad experience covering U.S. politics, foreign policy and the military, and has reported from more than 30 countries. His reporting drives news cycles and has been recognized with some of the most prestigious honors in journalism, including the Walter Cronkite Award for National Individual Achievement and the National Press Foundation's Everett McKinley Dirksen Award, the highest honor for Congressional reporting. He is also one of the few journalists to twice win both the Radio and TV Correspondents' Association's Joan Shorenstein Barone Award for excellence in Washington-based (2010 and 2015) and the White House Correspondents' Association's Award for Presidential Coverage under Deadline Pressure (2021 and 2022). He won an Emmy® Award for coverage of the 2009 Inauguration of President Barack Obama.
Karl has covered every major beat in Washington, including the White House, Capitol Hill, the Pentagon and the State Department. He's reported from the White House under four presidents, and more than a dozen press secretaries. Karl has covered seven presidential elections. During the 2016 cycle, he did the first network interview with Donald Trump, the first interview with Bernie Sanders as a presidential candidate and a rare, exclusive interview with the reclusive billionaire Charles Koch.
Prior to his current post, Karl served as ABC’s senior political correspondent, covering national political news, including presidential politics and Congress.
Karl joined ABC News in January 2003 as the network’s senior foreign affairs correspondent covering the State Department. He traveled around the world with Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. In December 2005, Karl was named senior national security correspondent. He reported extensively on the situation in Darfur, Sudan, visiting the war-torn country three times in 2005, and earning an Emmy nomination for his reporting.
In addition to his many interviews with leading political figures, Karl has interviewed singer Elton John, Hall of Famer Mariano Rivera, singer and actress Barbra Streisand, Pete Townshend of “The Who,” actor George Clooney, baseball legend Ernie Banks, Yoko Ono, the Dalai Lama, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, singer/songwriter James Taylor and other leading figures in sports and popular culture.
Before joining ABC News, Karl spent eight years as a political and congressional correspondent for CNN. Karl graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar College in Poughkeepsie.
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