News - Columnists - Bill Minor

Thursday, Oct. 22, 2009

Carter understands link between the press and good government

JACKSON -- Mention the Hodding Carters of Greenville, and the name brings to mind one of the legendary families of Southern journalism. Today, Hodding III, who left newspapering to become a nationally known TV commentator, columnist and educator, will find his way back to Mississippi to speak at Common Cause/Mississippi’s annual dinner.

Many will recall Hodding, who veered off on a political track in the 1970s and joined Jimmy Carter’s administration as assistant secretary of state and State Department spokesman. He was a daily fixture on TV in 1979-80 after Iranian students seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took 63 Americans hostage.

Hodding will team up with former Oxford Mayor Richard Howorth, the owner of that city’s Square Books, to discuss the related role of good government and the press. The dinner meeting will be held at the University Club here.

Howorth was virtually drafted by a good government group to run for mayor of Oxford in 2001 and won by a narrow vote. After one term, he won reelection in 2005 without opposition on a record of bringing a new openness to city government and putting an end to the practice of council members circumventing the state open meetings law.

He did not seek reelection in 2009 in order to devote full time to his Square Books, one of the noted independent bookstores in the nation, that thrives on Oxford’s reputation as the home of many noted authors.

“I strongly believe government belongs to the citizens, and my ambition as mayor was to communicate and be open to the public,” Howorth says. He had praise for his hometown newspaper, the Oxford Eagle, for covering meetings of city government agencies.

Common Cause/Mississippi, significantly, took a leading role in lobbying the Mississippi Legislature to enact the state’s open meetings law in 1975 and the public records law in 1979.

Carter was known in the family as “Little Hod” in contrast to “Big Hod,” the combative editorial patron of the talented newspaper Greenville family. After graduating from Princeton University in 1957, he did a two-year stint in the Marine Corps before joining the family’s Delta Democrat-Times as a reporter, then later moved up to become managing editor.

In 1961, Carter won Sigma Delta Chi National Journalism Society’s top award for editorial writing and his Delta Democrat-Times was recognized as one of the rare Southern newspapers to speak out for racial moderation.