Hodding Carter III
Former President, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
Hodding Carter III was president and CEO of the Knight Foundation from February 1998 until his retirement in July 2005. He is now on faculty as University Professor of leadership and public policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
He held the Knight Chair in Journalism at the University of Maryland College of Journalism from 1995 to 1998, focusing on public affairs reporting.
He was born in New Orleans, La., on April 7, 1935. His 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.
Carter graduated summa cum laude in June 1957 with a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University. That same month, he reported to duty as a lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps. 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 was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard in 1965-66 and worked on two presidential campaigns for Lydon Johnson and Jimmy Carter.
In January 1977, Carter became spokesman of the Department of State and Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, and served until 1980. He then launched a career in television, and has since served as host, anchor, panelist, correspondent and reporter for a variety of other public affairs television shows. He has written two books, The Reagan Years and The South Strikes Back.
