the 58th Mayor of Charlotte (Charlotte) Hugh Shelton (born 1942), retired U.S. Army General, Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff 1997–2001 (Tarboro) Edward Snowden (born 1983), NSA contractor who leaked top-secret documents regarding worldwide spying program (Elizabeth City) Richard Dobbs Spaight Sr (1758–1802), second NC signatory of U.S. Constitution and eighth Governor of North Carolina (New Bern) Edgar V. Starnes (born 1956), served in the North Carolina General Assembly (Granite Falls) Blake Wayne Van Leer (1926–1997), Commander and Captain in the U.S. Navy, led SeaBee program and lead the nuclear research and power unit at McMurdo Station during Operation Deep Freeze (Raleigh) Don Vaughan (born 1952), former member of the North Carolina State Senate who pushed for Susie's Law in 2010 (Greensboro) Robert F. Williams (1925–1996), civil rights activist who advocated using black armed guards to defend African-American neighborhoods from white supremacist groups (Monroe) John Ancrum Winslow (1811–1873), officer in the United States Navy during the Mexican–American War and American Civil War (Wilmington) Journalism and media Mary Ann Akers, political gossip columnist (High Point) David Brinkley (1920–2003), television newscaster, host of ABC-TV's This Week with David Brinkley 1981–96; co-anchor of the Huntley-Brinkley Report nightly newscast on NBC-TV 1956–70 (Wilmington) Sharon Dahlonega Raiford Bush, née Sharon Crews (born 1952), American television's first African-American female weather anchor of prime-time news (Greensboro) Howard Cosell (1918–1995), television sports journalist, star of ABC's Monday Night Football, commentator for many fights of Muhammad Ali (Winston-Salem) Josephus Daniels (1862–1948), founder of Raleigh News and Observer newspaper; U.S. Secretary of the Navy 1913–1921 under President Woodrow Wilson (Washington) David Gergen (born 1942), journalist; editor-at-large for U.S. News & World Report; director of Center for Public Leadership at John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard; senior political analyst at CNN (Durham) Al Hunt (born 1942), journalist, managing editor for Bloomberg News, panelist on CNN's Capital Gang news program (Winston-Salem) Carl Kassel (1934–2018), radio personality for NPR and journalist (Goldsboro) Anna Kooiman (born 1984), anchor and reporter for Fox News; co-host of Fox & Friends (Charlotte) Charles Kuralt (1934–1997), journalist and CBS television personality (Wilmington) Jennifer Loven, journalist and White House correspondent for Associated Press (Matthews) Edward R. Murrow (1908–1965), CBS News journalist and pioneer of television (near Greensboro) Walter Hines Page (1855–1918), journalist and publisher (Cary) Charlie Rose (born 1942), interviewer and journalist; host of PBS television talk show and CBS This Morning (Henderson) Morgan Radford (born 1987),