Jonathan Karl Biography
Jonathan Karl is ABC News chief Washington correspondent and co-anchor of This Week with George Stephanopoulos. He is also the President of the White House Correspondents' Association and author of the forthcoming book "Front Row at the Trump Show" (March 2020). 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 win the Radio and TV Correspondents' Association's Joan Shorenstein Barone Award for excellence in Washington-based reporting twice, in 2010 and 2015.
He won an Emmy® Award for coverage of the 2009 Inauguration of President Barack Obama. Karl was named The Tyndall Report’s most used reporter in 2017 and 2018, logging more airtime than any other network reporter for the first two years of the Trump presidency. 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. In his 15 years in Washington, Karl earned a reputation as a fierce government watchdog for his aggressive investigations of government waste. 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. 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, he served as a congressional correspondent for CNN. Karl graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar College in Poughkeepsie.
