Hodding Carter III, State Division Spokesman Throughout Iran Hostage Disaster, Dies at 88

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. (AP) — Hodding Carter III, a Mississippi journalist and civil rights activist who up to date Individuals on the Iran hostage disaster as U.S. State Division spokesman and received awards for his televised documentaries, has died. He was 88.

His daughter, Catherine Carter Sullivan, confirmed that he died Thursday in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Earlier than shifting to Washington in 1977, Carter was editor and writer of his household’s newspaper, the Delta Democrat-Occasions, in Greenville, Mississippi.

Carter had been co-chair of the Loyalist Democrats, a racially various group that received a credentials struggle on the 1968 Democratic Nationwide Conference in Chicago, unseating the all-white delegation by Mississippi’s governor, John Bell Williams.

Carter’s marketing campaign work in 1976 for Jimmy Carter, no relation, helped safe him a job as assistant secretary of state for public affairs. It was on this function that he was seen on tv information in the course of the 444 days that Iran held 52 Individuals hostage.

When Ronald Reagan was elected to the White Home in 1980, Carter returned to journalism as president of MainStreet, a tv manufacturing firm specializing in public affairs packages that earned him 4 nationwide Emmy Awards and the Edward R. Murrow Award for documentaries.

Carter appeared as a panelist, moderator or information anchor at ABC, BBC, NBC, CNN and PBS. He additionally wrote op-ed columns for the Wall Avenue Journal and different newspapers. He served twice on the steering committee of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

Carter later was named the John S. Knight Professor of Public Affairs Journalism on the College of Maryland. In 1998 he turned president of the John S. Knight and James L. Knight Basis, primarily based in Miami, Florida.

After leaving the inspiration, he started instructing management and public coverage on the College of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2006. He wrote two books, “The Reagan Years” and “The South Strikes Again.”

Carter, an ex-Marine who exercised often, underwent surgical procedure in 2012 to have a pacemaker put in to assist management an irregular coronary heart rhythm.

Progressive politics ran in his household. 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 bunch of neighborhood leaders to start out a weekly newspaper that developed into the Delta Democrat-Occasions.

His father’s editorials about social and financial intolerance earned him a nationwide status and timeless enmity and threats from white supremacists. He additionally received the Pulitzer Prize, in 1946, for a collection of editorials vital of U.S. remedy of Japanese-Individuals throughout World Battle II.

His mom, from a outstanding New Orleans household, was a function author and editor who recalled sitting at residence with a shotgun throughout her lap after receiving threats from the Ku Klux Klan.

Carter was the oldest of three sons. His brother Philip Dutarte Carter, reported for Newsweek and served as writer of the Delta Democrat-Occasions and Vieux Carré Courier in addition to financier of Gambit, a New Orleans weekly. One other brother, Thomas Hennen Carter, killed himself enjoying Russian roulette.

Hodding Carter III attended Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire earlier than graduating from Greenville Excessive College in 1953. He graduated from Princeton College in 1953 and married Margaret Ainsworth Wolfe. They’d 4 kids earlier than divorcing in 1978.

Carter later married Patricia M. Derian, a veteran of the Civil Rights Motion who sought to rework U.S. overseas coverage as President Carter’s assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs.

After she died in 2016, Carter married once more, in November 2019, to journalist and writer Patricia Ann O’Brien after the 2 related throughout a reunion on the Nieman Basis for Journalism.

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