FILE - Hodding Carter III, president, CEO and Trustee of the John S. and James L Knight Foundation, answers a question during a news conference in Washington, Monday, Nov. 24, 2003. Carter III, a Mississippi journalist and civil rights activist who updated Americans on the Iran hostage crisis as U.S. State Department spokesman and won awards for his televised documentaries, has died.
Before moving to Washington in 1977, Carter was editor and publisher of his family’s newspaper, the Delta Democrat-Times, in Greenville, Mississippi. 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 national Emmy Awards and the Edward R. Murrow Award for documentaries.
After leaving the foundation, he began teaching leadership and public policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2006. He wrote two books, “The Reagan Years” and “The South Strikes Back.” His father’s editorials about social and economic intolerance earned him a national reputation and undying enmity and threats from white supremacists. He also won the Pulitzer Prize, in 1946, for a series of editorials critical of U.S. treatment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.