In announcing its new Fellows and Foreign Honorary Members on Monday, (May 5), the Academy noted that this year's new members include Kofi Annan, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Donald Glaser, and William Gates, Sr., co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Carroll, who is the executive vice president and editor of the Los Angeles Times, is one of two journalists, along with Walter Cronkite, to be selected this year.

Founded in 1780 by John Adams, John Hancock and other scholar-patriots“to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people,” the Academy has elected“…the finest minds and most influential leaders from each generation.”

Carroll, who has been at the LA Times since 2000, began his career as a state staff reporter for the Providence, Rhode Island Journal-Bulletin the year he graduated in English with honors from Haverford. Following two years of service in the U.S. Army, he joined the Baltimore Sun in 1966 where he covered local news, and later became the paper's correspondent in Vietnam, the Middle East and at the White House. From 1972 to 1979, he served in several editorial positions at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and throughout the 1980s, he served in a number of executive positions at the Herald-Leader in Lexington, Kentucky. During his editorship, both papers received Pulitzers.

Carroll returned to the Sun in 1991 as editor, was named to the Pulitzer Prize board in 1994, and became vice president of Times Mirror in 1998.