Ex-State Dept. spokesman, face of Iranian hostage crisis
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — Hodding Carter III, a Mississippi journalist and civil rights activist who as U.S. State Department spokesman informed Americans about the Iran hostage crisis and later won awards for his televised documentaries, died Thursday. He was 88.
His daughter, Catherine Carter Sullivan, confirmed that he died in Chapel Hill, where he taught leadership and public policy.
Before moving to Washington in 1977, Carter was editor and publisher of his family’s newspaper, the Delta Democrat-Times, in Greenville, Mississippi.
Carter had been co-chair of the Loyalist Democrats, a racially diverse group that won a credentials fight at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, unseating the all-white delegation by Mississippi’s governor, John Bell Williams.
Carter’s campaign work in 1976 for Jimmy Carter, no relation, helped secure him a job as assistant secretary of state for public affairs. It was in this role that he was seen on television news broadcasts during the 444 days that Iran held 52 Americans hostage.
When Ronald Reagan was elected to the White House in 1980, Carter returned to journalism as president of MainStreet, a television production company specializing in public affairs programs that earned him four Emmy Awards and the Edward R. Murrow Award for documentaries.
Carter appeared as a panelist, moderator or news anchor at ABC, BBC, NBC, CNN and PBS. He also wrote op-ed columns for The Wall Street Journal and other newspapers. He served twice on the steering committee of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
In 1994, he became a professor of journalism at the University of Maryland, and from 1998 to 2005, he was president of the Knight
Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports excellence in journalism. In recent years, he taught leadership and public policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he lived.
Carter, an ex-Marine who exercised regularly, underwent surgery in 2012 to have a pacemaker installed to help control an irregular heart rhythm.
William Hodding Carter III was born April 7, 1935, in New Orleans, to William Hodding Carter Jr. and Betty Werlein Carter. They moved to Greenville, Mississippi, recruited by a group of community leaders to start a weekly newspaper that evolved into the Delta Democrat-Times.
Carter was the oldest of three sons. His brother Philip Dutarte Carter, reported for Newsweek and served as publisher of the Delta Democrat-Times and Vieux Carré Courier as well as financier of Gambit, a New Orleans weekly. Another brother, Thomas Hennen Carter, died at 19.