Hodding Carter III, rural journalist, diplomatic spokesman, documentarian and journalism foundation chief, dies at 88 - Entrepreneur Generations

Hodding Carter III in 2003 (Associated Press photo by Susan Walsh)

Hodding Carter III, a small-town editor-publisher who became best known as the State Department's spokesman during the Iran hostage crisis, then produced award-winning documentaries and ran the nation's leading journalism foundation, died May 11 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He was 88.

Carter was the son of Hodding Carter Jr., who won a 1946 Pulitzer Prize for editorials that decried racial, religious and economic intolerance. He worked at the family's Delta Democrat-Times in Greenville, Miss., for 17 years, keeping a gun in his pocket and his desk because of threats the family received for their editorial stances. He worked on Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter's 1976 presidential campaign, which led to his position in the administration. He resigned after the failed raid to rescue the hostages, following his boss, Secrtetary Cyrus Vance, who had opposed it.

The family's 1980 sale of the paper to a "conservative newspaper chain" angered some of their liberal readers, reports Harrison Smith of The Washington Post. But Carter returned to journalism as a columnist and broadcast journalist and won four Emmy Awards for documentaries on foreign policy and civil rights. From 1997 to 2005, he was president of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and "grew the organization’s endowment to more than $1.9 billion and more than doubled its grants to journalists and news organizations, to some $90 million annually," Smith notes.

One of Carter's last grants was $250,000 to the University of Kentucky to start the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, which publishes The Rural Blog and is dedicated to the sustainability of rural journalism. Carter told those seeking the grant that despite his history, the foundation had never done anything for rural journalism, so he was giving them the most he could without running the plan past a foundation committee. It also helped that one of those doing the asking was Al Smith, a retired Kentucky newspaper publisher who was an editor at one of the New Orleans papers when Carter was an intern there. "He taught me how to drink martinis for lunch," Carter said of Smith, who drank himself out of jobs at both New Orleans papers but kicked alcohol in 1962 and was chairman emeritus of the institute's advistory board when he died in 2021.

Carter's survivors include his wife, Patricia O'Brien of Brookline, Mass.; four children from his first marriage, Hodding Carter IV of Camden, Maine, Catherine Carter Sullivan of Jackson, Miss., Margaret Carter Joseph of Brevard, N.C., and Finn Carter of Worcester, Mass.; three stepchildren from his marriage to Patricia Derian, Mike Derian of Takoma Park, Md., and Craig Derian and Brooke Derian of Chapel Hill; a brother, Philip; and 12 grandchildren.

from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/6Csw2o0 Hodding Carter III, rural journalist, diplomatic spokesman, documentarian and journalism foundation chief, dies at 88 - Entrepreneur Generations

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