National Journal White House correspondent Carl M. Cannon

Carl M. Cannon is the White House correspondent for National Journal, Washington’s highly respected non-partisan weekly journal on politics and government.

Cannon joined the magazine in May 1998 to cover the White House under President Clinton.  Last year, he was honored for that coverage by winning the prestigious Gerald R. Ford prize for distinguished reporting of the presidency.

Before joining National Journal, Cannon worked for six newspapers over a 20-year span.  Cannon came to Washington, D.C. during the first term of President Ronald Reagan, but has also worked in Virginia, Georgia and California, where he covered police, courts, local politics, education and race relations.

In 1993, he was hired by the Baltimore Sun to cover the White House under President Clinton. While vacationing in San Francisco in 1989 to watch the Bay Area World Series, Cannon found himself covering the Loma Prieta earthquake instead.  He was a member of the San Jose Mercury News staff awarded the Pulitzer Prize for that coverage.

As a reporter in the Washington bureau of Knight-Ridder Newspapers from 1982 to 1993, he covered the California congressional delegation, technology policy, western lands issues, politics and the presidential campaigns of 1984, 1988 and 1992.

In 1982, Cannon’s reporting on a 1937 Los Angeles murder helped secure a pardon based on innocence for a man wrongfully convicted, then-80-year-old Pete Pianezzi.

Working in the mid-1970s in Columbus, Ga., Cannon wrote an exposé that resulted in capital murder charges being dropped against a mentally impaired defendant who was coached by police into confessing to a string of murders he didn’t commit.

Cannon has written for numerous other magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, the New Republic, Forbes ASAP, George magazine, National Review and Mother Jones. A native of San Francisco, he attended the University of Colorado, majoring in journalism.

Cannon lives in Arlington, Virginia. He and his wife Sharon have three children ranging in ages from 6 to 20. Carl’s passions include fly fishing, reading history and playing amateur baseball in an over-30 hardball league.