Karen Travers

About

Karen Travers joined ABC News in 2000 and is a White House correspondent.She is a senior member of the ABC News White House team, having covered the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations and now the Biden administration. In her role as correspondent for ABC News, ABC News Radio, NewsOne and ABC News Live, Travers’ reporting from the White House can be seen, heard and read across the country and around the world.Karen has served on the board of the White House Correspondents’ Association since 2020. She has been honored with two Gracie Awards: Outstanding Radio News Anchor and News Feature for a piece on the child care industry. She has won multiple Edward R Murrow Awards, including the Breaking News award in 2021 for ABC Audio’s coverage of former President Trump testing positive for COVID-19 and his hospitalization and the Breaking News award in 2022 for ABC Audio’s coverage of January 6th. Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, Travers has done in-depth reporting for ABC News Live on the child care industry, school closures and reopenings, paid family leave, the scramble to find vaccines, and the challenges for families with unvaccinated children under age 5.Since joining ABC News as an intern, Travers has extensively covered Washington and national politics, including five presidential campaign seasons and four administrations, traveling to 49 states and more than 60 countries. She has reported on the ground in every critical battleground state, covering primaries and caucuses, Republican and Democratic conventions, and presidential debates in every election cycle since 2004.Career highlights include traveling as a producer on two of former President Obama’s secret trips to Afghanistan in 2010, producing exclusive reports on board the USS Eisenhower in the North Arabian Sea in 2007, and receiving an Emmy Award for her work as deputy political director on ABC’s coverage of the 2009 Obama Inauguration.Travers has also covered many major stories outside politics, including the mass shooting at the Washington Navy Yard; the Amtrak derailment in Philadelphia; unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland; and key Supreme Court arguments and decisions.Before her first assignment at the White House in 2005, Travers covered the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign as an embedded reporter. She spent the first years of her career at ABC News working for Nightline, primarily as a researcher for Ted Koppel. There, she reported on the Sept. 11 attacks, the Iraq war, major national and international stories, as well as sports and popular culture.