Advisory Board of Governors
Hodding Carter III
Former President and CEO, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
Hodding Carter III, a native of New Orleans who spent half his life in Mississippi and the other half in various political, media and non-profit enterprises along America’s East Coast, was appointed University Professor of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in January 2006.
Mr. Carter came to that post after almost eight years as president and CEO of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation in Miami. The Knight foundation is concerned with community and civic development in selected American communities and the furtherance of press freedom and improvement of press performance at home and abroad.
A graduate of Greenville, Mississippi’s E.E. Bass High School, he graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School in 1957, and returned to Greenville and his family’s daily newspaper in 1959 after two years as a United States Marine Corps lieutenant. While there, he won the national professional journalism society’s award for editorial writing in 1961 and a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard for 1965-66. He was variously reporter, managing editor and editor/associate publisher during his 17 years at the paper.
Mr. Carter became actively engaged with racial and political reform efforts in Mississippi in the mid-1960s. In 1968 he was co-chair of the biracial delegation that ousted the state’s white regular Democratic Party delegation at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
In 1980 he went into news and public affairs television. Working variously as anchor, commentator, production company president and reporter over the next 14 years, he won four national Emmys and the Edward R. Murrow Award for best foreign documentary. During the same period he was a regular panelist on This Week with David Brinkley, an op-ed columnist for the Wall Street Journal and frequent contributor to magazines and newspapers across the country. At one time or another he worked on air for or with PBS, CNN, NBC, ABC, BBC and CBC.
In 1994 he was named to the tenured post of Knight Professor of Public Affairs Journalism at the University of Maryland, College Park, which he resigned when named president of Knight Foundation in 1998.
A trustee of Princeton University over a 15 year period, he is currently on the boards of The Century Foundation,the Center for Public Integrity,the Enterprise Corporation of the Delta, the Foundation for the Mid-South and seven Dreyfus Corporation mutual funds.
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