The Baptist State Convention of North Carolina’s Biblical Recorder intends to fill the four openings on the newsjournal’s board of directors this year with their own selections.
The move utilizes a provision added to the convention’s bylaws in 1992 which, as described in a Feb. 1 news story in the Recorder, permits “each affiliated college, institution or agency to nominate up to 50 percent of its trustees or directors. In return, the entity gives up a similar percentage of its funding from the BSC during the time those directors serve.”
A loss of $400,000 in state convention funding could result from the move over a four-year period, the Recorder acknowledged.
Tony Cartledge, the Recorder’s editor-president, said in the article that the move was prompted by circumstances last year in which the convention’s Committee on Nominations presented to the convention messengers only two of eight individuals who had been recommended by the Recorder for four positions on its 16-member board.
“As for why these good people were excluded, all we have to go on is the chairman’s statement to Conservative Carolina Baptists that the committee wanted to put more conservatives on the Biblical Recorder board,” Cartledge said.
“In most other state conventions where agenda-bearing conservatives have gained control of the state paper’s board, they have either muzzled the editor through censorship, or replaced him with someone who could be counted on to promote the party line,” Cartledge said. “A free Baptist press was lost in those conventions.”
The Recorder article noted that typically each year, presidents of each BSC entity “present the committee with a list of potential trustees that they believe will best serve the interests of their organization. The list generally includes twice the number of trustees or directors to be elected, in priority order.”
The Recorder was the only convention entity, the article stated, for which directors were nominated apart from its recommendations.
“We exercise this option with deep regret,” Joe Babb, chairman of the Biblical Recorder’s board of directors, said in the article, “not only for the loss of funding, but for the increasing polarization in BSC life that has led us to believe that, for the time being, this decision is necessary in order to safeguard and preserve the charter principles of a free press for the future. We have no agenda for changing our relationship to the BSC.” – BP