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

Hodding Carter III (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 largest journalism foundation, died Thursday in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He was 88 and had suffered strokes.

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, and won the Sigma Delta Chi Award for editorial writing in 1961. In 1968 he headed "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," The Associated Press notes. He worked on the 1976 presidential campaign of Jimmy Carter (no kin), which led to his administration job. He resigned after the failed raid to rescue the hostages, following Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, who had opposed it.

The Carter family's 1980 sale of the paper to a conservative 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. He liked to say, "Power never likes to be questioned, analyzed or covered at all critically." From 1998 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 help 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, according to 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 served two years in the Marine Corps, was a professor at the universities of Maryland and North Carolina, and wrote two books, The South Strikes Back, in 1959, and The Reagan Years, a 1988 collection of essays published from 1981 through 1987. He "held deeply the notion of service — to his country, to justice and equity and to his family — throughout his life, instilling in those he knew personally and professionally 'this incredible sense of social responsibility'," stepson Mike Derian told The News & Observer of Raleigh.

His survivors include his wife, Patricia O'Brien of Brookline, Mass.; four children from his first marriage, to Margaret Ainsworth Wolfe: 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 Patt Derian: Mike Derian of Takoma Park, Md., and Craig Derian and Brooke Derian of Chapel Hill; a brother, Philip Dutarte Carter; and 12 grandchildren. He will be buried in Greenville. Sullivan told the News & Observer that the family will hold a celebration of life in Chapel Hill at a date to be determined.