Karen Travers
Karen Travers is a White House correspondent and senior member of the ABC News White House team. She joined ABC News in 2000 and is currently covering her fifth president, Donald Trump, for all ABC platforms. She is also in her third term on the board of the White House Correspondents’ Association. Her work can be seen across the 200 ABC News affiliate stations via ABC NewsOne, the network’s affiliate news service, and her reporting for ABC News Radio can be heard on 1650 radio stations and multiple digital distributors.
Travers began her career at ABC News as an intern and soon started working as a researcher for Ted Koppel at “Nightline,” a position she held for nearly three years, where she reported on the Sept. 11 attacks, the Iraq war, major national and international stories, as well as sports and popular culture. Travers then served as an embedded political reporter, covering the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign and traveling primarily with former Vice President Cheney on Air Force Two to battleground states. She later became a producer and the network’s deputy political director.
She has covered every major national political story and traveled to 49 states and more than 60 countries during her time at ABC News. She has reported from key battleground states, covering primaries and caucuses, Republican and Democratic conventions and presidential debates in every election cycle since 2004.
Travers has also covered many major stories outside the world of politics, including the economics of the child care industry and paid family leave; the mass shooting at the Washington Navy Yard; the Amtrak derailment in Philadelphia; the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland; and key Supreme Court arguments and decisions. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Travers went beyond White House headlines to cover school closures and reopenings, the early scramble to find vaccines, and the challenges families with young children faced before vaccines were available.
Before reporting on the current Trump administration, she also covered Biden’s, Trump’s first, and Obama’s administrations and spent four years covering the 2008 election. Travers traveled as a producer on both of former President Obama’s secret trips to Afghanistan in 2010 and as a reporter on his other trips overseas. She reported extensively on the Obama administration’s domestic policy agenda, including the process of developing and passing the Affordable Care Act. She served as the deputy political director for the 2008 election coverage, led the network’s reporting on the Democratic and Republican delegate processes, covered key battleground states, and reported from presidential debates and both conventions.
From December 2004 through June 2007, before joining ABC News’ political unit, Travers worked as a White House producer covering the Bush administration. At the White House, she was responsible for ABC News’ editorial coverage and for planning events, speeches and breaking news. During this time, Travers traveled to Iraq and Bahrain on a military embed and produced exclusive reports onboard the USS Eisenhower in the North Arabian Sea. She also spent a month as a producer in the ABC News Baghdad bureau.
Travers has been honored with two Gracie Awards by the Alliance for Women in Media, including Outstanding Radio News Anchor. She was part of the ABC News team that received an Emmy® Award for its coverage of former President Obama’s inauguration. Her reporting was part of the ABC News Radio coverage that received the Edward R. Murrow Award for Breaking News in 2021 for President Trump’s testing positive for COVID-19 and his hospitalization, in 2022 for the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, and in 2023 for coverage of the start of the War in Ukraine.
A native of Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, Travers graduated with a bachelor’s in American government and a master’s in liberal studies from Georgetown University.
Travers lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, John Anderson, and their three children. In her spare time, she enjoys coaching her children’s sports teams and volunteering with their activities, exploring D.C., traveling to the Jersey Shore and cheering on her Philly sports teams and the Georgetown Hoyas.
