MARION, N.C. (ABP) — A member of the board of the North Carolina Baptist State Convention’s newspaper has resigned to protest what she described as “pressure” on the paper's editor to slant the news.
On Nov. 4, the Biblical Recorder published a resignation letter from Patricia Faulkner, chair of the board’s personnel committee. Faulkner wrote she was quitting because the board had accepted Editor Norman Jameson’s Oct. 21 offer to resign after a public threat to defund the paper at the upcoming North Carolina Baptist State Convention meeting, scheduled for Nov. 8-10.
“Some of those who wanted to accept [Jameson’s] resignation belong to churches that do not even subscribe to the Recorder,” Faulkner, a member of First Baptist Church in Marion, N.C., said in her letter. “This resignation was offered because of pressure from a few who do not want any diversity in our congregations. Freedom of the press as we know it died on the 21st of October.”
Faulkner said in a phone interview Nov. 4 that Jameson was increasingly under pressure both from some Recorder directors and others in the state convention angered by the editor’s refusal to avoid covering subjects in Baptist life that irk conservatives, who have solidified their control over the convention.
“It’s the feeling that we can’t say anything anybody disagrees with," she said. "So how are you going to be an editor if you can’t say something anybody disagrees with?”
Norman Jameson
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Jameson's resignation came at a Recorder board meeting after Sandy Beck, director of missions in the Hendersonville-based Carolina Baptist Association, wrote convention leaders warning that unless he was removed as editor, a motion would come from the floor of the convention to defund the newspaper in the state convention's Cooperative Program unified budget.
“It seems that Mr. Jameson does not know the mindset of this predominantly biblically conservative state,” Beck wrote. “Enough is enough. If his board of directors cannot influence his lack of sensitivity, perhaps the conservative pastors and laity of this state can.”
Cooperative Program funding accounts for about 45 percent of the Biblical Recorder’s $726,500 budget in 2010.
Jameson, a Baptist journalist since 1977, said he was confident until just hours before his board meeting that the Recorder would survive such a challenge if it did materialize. When his board did not back him up with the same confidence, he offered to resign.
“It was necessary because I came to the conclusion eventually that the threat to the Recorder was real, and in the grand scheme of things I’m a pretty small fish,” he said.
Jameson, 56, has been criticized recently for continuing to cover North Carolina Woman’s Missionary Union, which is no longer recognized by the state convention but still is active in most North Carolina Baptist churches. The paper has also continued to include stories about the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, a moderate breakaway group that was included in one of the state convention’s multiple budget options before they were eliminated in favor of a single plan that excluded CBF, but kept giving to the Southern Baptist Convention.
In her resignation letter Faulkner, a retired school principal, said she has been a lifelong Baptist, but “now I feel that all are not welcome in our tent.”
While her church treasures diversity, she said, “Our state convention is no longer that way as we must pass a ‘test’ of opinion to see if we are worthy. Like the ancient Israelite, I must move my tent to another place.”
Board chairman Bill Flowe, an attorney who is a member of First Baptist Church in Liberty, N.C., did not immediately respond to a request for comment Nov. 4.
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Robert Marus is managing editor and Washington bureau chief for Associated Baptist Press. ABP Senior Writer Bob Allen contributed to this story.
Related ABP stories:
Opinion: Fairness and freedom (10/29/2010)
Baptist newspaper editor resigns (10/22/2010)