Karen Travers
Karen Travers joined ABC News in 2000 and is a Washington-based 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.
Travers serves on the board of the White House Correspondents’ Association. She was recently honored with a Gracie Award for Outstanding Radio News Anchor by the Alliance for Women in Media. She also received two Edward R. Murrow Awards in 2021, including the Breaking News Award for her radio coverage of former President Trump testing positive for COVID-19 and his hospitalization.
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 early 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 the world of politics, including 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.
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.
A native of Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, Travers graduated in 2000 with a degree in American government from Georgetown University. She earned a master’s degree in liberal studies from Georgetown in 2003. Travers lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, John Anderson, and their three children. In her spare time, she enjoys traveling to the Jersey Shore, exploring D.C. with her children and watching sports. She remains a diehard Hoyas fan with men’s basketball season tickets.
