Q&A with Ferrel Guillory on NC’s Sunshine Week

This week marks Sunshine Week in North Carolina, a week devoted to promoting open government.

State & National Editor Madeline Will sat down with Ferrel Guillory, a UNC journalism professor who covered mostly state government issues for the (Raleigh) News & Observer for more than 20 years, to talk about sunshine in the state.

DAILY TAR HEEL: Do you know when Sunshine Week started?

Ferrel Guillory: No, but it’s been relatively recent. It’s not that people weren’t interested in transparency and government and trying to do some things, (but) having a specific week has been recent.

DTH: How much sunshine does N.C. government have?

FG: We’ve got some fairly sound laws — the Public Records Law, the Open Meetings Law. We’ve long had the premise that government is open and transparent both in terms of meetings and in terms of records, but we can do better.

The big need or the big aspiration right now in my mind is, how do you do something akin to C-SPAN in North Carolina? We need to have cameras — both video and audio — in state legislative chambers and the committee meetings in the legislature and the big meetings of state government.

That would cost some money, admittedly.

C-SPAN doesn’t get huge audiences, but it does when there’s something really important going on. It gives you a visual record of it.

I’m just kind of tired of the TV reporter standing out in the rain in front of the legislative building telling us what’s going on inside. One is, why are they standing in the rain? Most people would go inside. And secondly, instead of them just telling us about what’s going on, they could show it. I do think we could do better there.

DTH: It seems like that will be a gradual change — some rooms in the legislature have audio.

FG: Some of the big rooms are (wired for sound). The building was built well before the internet/video age.

It just seems to me that that level of transparency ought to be there.

There are some other controversies going on right now, as you know from the News & Observer (article this week): email requests, public records seem to be taking a long time. It’s hard to judge whether there’s some coordinated effort to delay — I certainly hope not.

I do think as a general rule, emails that are relevant to the conduct of business ought to be relatively easy to access and stored for a sufficient period of time.

DTH: North Carolina’s public records law doesn’t have a set time frame, instead saying that requests need to be fulfilled as promptly as possible.

Do you think that vagueness can lead to public officials waiting to fulfill requests?

FG: You break the (state) constitution every time you write a tuition check, because it says (tuition should be as) free as practicable. Our laws are full of those phrases, and then it’s left up to the discretion of policymakers and the courts as how to enforce it.

We’re still adapting to the digital age both in terms of how reporters do their jobs and also how public officials do their jobs.

At least the University’s (defense) in the suits having to do with the athletic department is that it’s against the law to break the confidentiality of student records — grades and things like that.

I think the University ought not to be seen as hesitant or putting up barriers. I think the University ought to set a standard of transparency.

DTH: Has the state become more or less transparent in recent years?

FG: It’s probably become more transparent simply because of the technologies.

You can dial up things now that you used to have to sit down and plow through tons and tons of paper and hope that you got all the files.

Technology has contributed to an enhancement of transparency, but it’s also, not surprisingly, created some controversies, some disputes about what can and can’t be released and in what period of time.

state@dailytarheel.com