Jonathan Karl

Jonathan Karl is an American political journalist. Karl has covered every major beat in Washington, D.C., including the White House, Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, and the State Department, and has reported from more than 30 countries, covering U.S. politics, foreign policy, and the military. He has contributed to various ABC News programs, including Good Morning America and Nightline, and has interviewed many public figures, including Donald Trump, the 14th Dalai Lama and Republican Senator Ted Cruz.

Karl has been the Chief White House Correspondent for ABC News in Washington, D.C., since December 2012. He is the author of the 2020 book Front Row at the Trump Show (ISBN 978-1524745622).

Karl credits his passion for history and journalism to a time in his adolescent years when his family moved to South Dakota. Karl graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1990, where he was the Editor-in-Chief of the Vassar Spectator.

Karl began his career as a researcher and reporter for The New Republic, continued as an investigative reporter for the New York Post, and became a Congressional Correspondent for CNN before joining ABC News in January 2003 as the Senior Foreign Affairs Correspondent covering the State Department. He worked for ABC covering national political news, becoming the Senior National Security Correspondent in December 2005. His current post is Chief White House Correspondent as of December 2012.

Karl's writings have been published in The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, The New Republic, Reason, The Christian Science Monitor, and the San Francisco Chronicle, and he has written for "The Note", a political blog run by ABC News.

Karl is the author of The Right to Bear Arms: The Rise of America's New Militias.

Karl has appeared on This Week with George Stephanopoulos (for which he has also been a guest anchor), Nightline, Good Morning America, World News with Diane Sawyer, and Special Report with Bret Baier.

Controversies

Karl became a controversial figure in May 2013, when he wrote an article that claimed to quote directly from an e-mail sent by a White House advisor. It was later revealed that the quote was inaccurately given to Karl by an unnamed source, and that he himself had never seen the e-mail. Karl apologized for the error, and also for not having stated that the quote was from a detailed summary his source provided, rather than a direct quote from the e-mail.

On March 27, 2020, at a White House briefing on the coronavirus pandemic, Karl asked President Donald Trump if he would guarantee that every American who needed a ventilator would get one. Trump retorted to Karl with the admonition, "Look, don't be a cutie pie. OK?" The exchange went viral on social media with a surge of memes highlighting the incident.

Karl received the 2011 Joan Shorenstein Barone Award for excellence in Washington, D.C.-based reporting, the 2013 Walter Cronkite Award for National Individual Achievement, an Emmy Award in 2009 for his coverage of the Presidential Inauguration of Barack Obama, and the National Press Foundation's Everett McKinley Dirksen Award in 2001.