Karen Hosler, Baltimore Sun correspondent who covered Ronald Reagan, dies

Frederick N. Rasmussen, Baltimore Sun
·5 min read

Karen Hosler, a Baltimore Sun correspondent whose beats included Congress and the White House, died Feb.1 of complications of a glioblastoma at the assisted living facility Bay Village in Annapolis. She was 75.

“Karen always brightened up a room with her cheerfulness, her wonderful laughter, her joy for life and her deep commitment to first-rate journalism done the right way,” wrote Barry Rascovar, former Sun deputy editorial page editor, in an email. “She loved reporting on politics, be it Annapolis city government, the governor and General Assembly or the White House and Congress.”

Doug Struck, who now teaches journalism at Emerson College in Boston, worked with Ms. Hosler at The Annapolis Capital and later The Sun.

“She covered many things. but her favorite sandbox was Annapolis politics. ‘Hos,’ as her friends called her, was the Brenda Starr of the State House pressroom — gutsy, bold, loud and sexy,” he said.

“She loved to schmooze with the ‘muldoons,’ as she affectionately called the legislators. And she was affectionate, even when reveling in their stumbles and outrages, she enjoyed them as people. She was a damned good reporter — the best of the Annapolis press corps,” Mr. Struck said.

Karen Argy, daughter of William Argy, an FBI agent, and Phyllis Reid Argy, a school teacher, was born in Niagara Falls, New York.

She moved with her family to New Carrollton and graduated in 1966 from DuVal High School in Lanham.

Ms. Hosler earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism in 1970 from the University of Maryland, College Park, where she was on the staff of The Diamondback, the campus newspaper.

After college, she began her career as a press aide to U.S. Senator Charles “Mac” Mathias and then began covering politics for The Bowie Blade and Prince George’s News.

She then joined the staff in the early 1970s of what was then known as The Evening Capital in Annapolis, where she covered government, including the General Assembly and Anne Arundel County elections.

Joel McCord, who worked with Ms. Hosler in Annapolis, recalled first meeting her in The Capital’s West Street newsroom.

“She was sassy, brassy and bold, qualities I came to admire after I got to know her,” wrote Mr. McCord, who later became a Sun colleague and news director at WYPR, in an email.

“She had the perfect reporter’s combination of skepticism of what the government officials she was covering was telling her and empathy for the people she covered,” he wrote. “She asked the questions that got right to the heart of things.”

She joined The Arundel Sun in 1977, and then went back to Annapolis, where she covered politics and state government.

From 1980 to 1983, she was the paper’s state political reporter and from 1983 to 1988 its Maryland correspondent.

“Karen was indefatigable and fiercely competitive. She never stopped working her sources and her stories,” said Tom Linthicum, a retired Sun editor who worked with Ms. Hosler in the state house bureau. “Her energy and wicked sense of humor made the long, and demanding hours pass faster.”

In 1988, she was named White House correspondent where she covered the administrations of Presidents Ronald W. Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

In 2002, Maryland Representative Steny H. Hoyer entered into the Congressional Record that Ms. Hosler was “always a tough interrogator of a politician. She asked the hard questions that we didn’t always like to answer, but she always got it out of us. She took her responsibility as a reporter very seriously and her readers were better off for it.”

” I remember when we were invited by President Reagan to attend a state dinner at the White House,” said her husband of 46 years, Alan Friedman, an adjunct professor at the Naval Academy. “We were waiting to go through security and after looking around at the grandeur of the White House, Karen said, ‘Not bad for a kid from New Carrollton and a guy from Pimlico.'”

A longtime member of the Annapolis Striders who completed 12 marathons including Boston, New York and Marine Corps, she brought her love of running to Washington, and often ran with President Clinton.

She described the president in a 1993 Sun article as a “46-year-old amateur runner with thunder thighs, a spare tire and what has often been described as the world’s toughest job… The president’s shuffling stride and plodding running style are deceptive. He’s a whole lot faster than he looks.”

Ms. Hosler was The Sun’s congressional correspondent from 1993 to 1998, and then its deputy Washington bureau chief from 1999 to 2002, when she returned to Baltimore and was an editorial writer until leaving the paper in 2008.

From 2008 until retiring in 2020, she was a WYPR talk show host, reporter and assignment editor.

In a departure from her usual beat, Ms. Hosler wrote a moving first person account in 1985 for the old Sunday Sun Magazine about her experiences as one of the first to go through Hopkins’s test-tube baby program which in her case was not successful.

In an Editor’s Note, she wrote of her doubts about going public with a very personal matter.

“This is a real, real personal thing. Whether you can or can not have a child is wound up in your whole sense of yourself as a woman,” she wrote. “There’s that whole stigma of infertility.”

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After completing the story she wrote, “I feel very comfortable with it. I’ve been telling people I never told before. The more I thought about it, the more I thought it was an important story to tell.”

Her experience later became a PBS special.

Ms. Hosler, who lived in Annapolis, owned a horse and was a member of the Marlborough Hunt Club where she enjoyed fox hunting, jumping fences and attending the club’s social events, her husband said.

At her request, an Irish wake celebrating her life was held Wednesday at The Lodge in Annapolis.

In addition to her husband, she is survived by a brother, Richard Argy, of Howard County.