only 13 percent of the vote in Mississippi in the last election held prior to passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Carter also worked on Jimmy Carter's campaign in 1976. President Carter appointed him Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs and State Department spokesman. Because of the Iran Hostage Crisis, Carter came into the public eye much more frequently than most of his predecessors and successors. When Ronald W. Reagan was elected in 1980, Carter left his post in the government and moved into television as a major critic of Reagan’s policies. Up until 1994, he held various positions for ABC, BBC, CBC, CNN, NBC, and PBS, including anchor, political commentator, panelist, and reporter. His most notable television work was as the host of the media criticism show Inside Story on PBS. Throughout the 1980s, he was one of the rotating guest panelists for the roundtable segment of This Week with David Brinkley, while he also regularly wrote op-ed columns for various newspapers including The Wall Street Journal. He gave the 1986 commencement speech at George Washington University. Beginning in 1994, he served as the Knight Professor of Public Affairs Journalism at the University of Maryland at College Park, Maryland. He resigned the post in 1998 to become the president of the Knight Foundation. He serves on a commission funded by the foundation, the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics. Since then, Carter has lectured at universities all over the country and continued to do freelance work for the television and print media. His most recent position is University Professor of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Carter contributed to After Snowden: Privacy, Secrecy, and Security in the Information Age, published in May 2015. References External links Oral History Interview with Hodding Carter from Oral Histories of the American South Interview from The State of Things (radio show) on February 28, 2011 Hodding Carter III Tangled Nicaragua: An Exchange | by Tony Jenkins | The New York Review of Books 1935 births American male journalists American newspaper editors American newspaper publishers (people) United States Assistant Secretaries of State Living people Politicians from Greenville, Mississippi Writers from New Orleans Phillips Exeter Academy alumni Princeton University alumni University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill faculty Mississippi Democrats Journalists from Mississippi United States Department of State spokespeople