Hodding Carter III

Hodding Carter III served as University Professor of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was involved in multiple university committees and initiatives, including the UNC Press Development Council and the Center for the Study of the American South.

He was president and CEO of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation from 1998 to 2005. During his tenure, the foundation awarded more than $15 million in grants supporting freedom of information, including funding for the National Freedom of Information Coalition, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, National Security Archive, Sunshine Week, and other journalism organizations.

Carter spent nearly 18 years at the Delta Democrat-Times in Greenville, Mississippi, where he held several editorial roles. In 1977, he was appointed Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs and State Department spokesman, serving during the Iran hostage crisis. He previously worked on the presidential campaigns of Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter. 

Carter held the Knight Chair in Journalism at the University of Maryland College of Journalism and from 1965-66 he was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard. He worked on two presidential campaigns for Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter. In January 1977, Carter became spokesman of the Department of State and Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, serving until 1980. He then launched a career in television, and has since served as host, anchor, panelist, correspondent and reporter for a variety of public-affairs television shows.

Carter’s father was a newspaper publisher and editor in the South whose editorials on racial and religious tolerance for the family-owned Greenville, Miss., Delta Democrat-Times won the Pulitzer Prize in 1946. Hodding Carter III graduated summa cum laude in June 1957 with a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University. After serving in the military, he returned to Greenville in 1959, where he spent nearly 18 years as reporter-editorial writer, managing editor and editor and associate publisher of the Delta Democrat-Times. He has written two books, The Reagan Years and The South Strikes Back. He graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1957.

He died in 2023 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

(Updated April 2025)