Transparency is a critical component of a free, open and functioning press. In North Carolina, media organizations and journalists participate in an annual acknowledgement of the importance of transparency: Sunshine Week.
In 2023, a collaboration of eight news organizations worked together on a Sunshine Week project to determine what, if any, books were banned in North Carolina school libraries. By surveying public records from all 115 school districts over the past two years, the collaboration found at least 189 book challenges. The work is just one example of the way journalists use open records to better inform the public and hold public officials accountable.
Many news organizations turn to the NC Open Government Coalition, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that assists journalists and citizens across the state, to understand their rights to get public records and attend open meetings. They offer information and support to those trying to navigate legal barriers to government transparency, and they offer training sessions throughout the year.
BPR's Lilly Knoepp spoke with NC Open Government Coalition Director Brooks Fuller about Sunshine Week, government transparency and the role of the fourth estate.
LK: What is a Sunshine law?
BF: Sunshine laws in there modern form have really been around with us since the 1970s after the Watergate scandal in DC during the Nixon administration. And so states around the country after that scandal and during the passage of the Federal Freedom of Information Act also passed some of their same, or some of their own laws that relate to freedom of information, government transparency, public records and open meetings.
State's laws vary quite a bit, but the general theme behind those is that citizens have the right to get records of government activity. That those are our records in North Carolina. They're the property of the people we pay for them through tax dollars and things of that nature, and so we're entitled to see what our government is up to. Similarly, we're entitled to attend open meetings to check in on how government business is getting done.
Sunshine Week sort of celebrates those facts and also acts as a call to action around the country and in the individual states through our individual statewide coalitions. It acts as a call to action to encourage government officials to abide by the law of course, but also just embrace the spirit of transparency and to encourage citizens and journalists also to exercise their rights under those laws to get information. It's a big deal around the country. There's a lot of activities that go on every year where statewide partnerships do the work of educating the public and really calling attention to the issues of transparency and how we can best meet the challenges of transparency today.
"What journalists do is they act as that proxy for the public...Journalists are hired to be your watchdog in the fight for open records and open information."
-Brooks Fuller, Director of NC Open Government Coalition
LK: BPR took part in one of those partnerships this year with other media outlets in the state to ask school boards about banned books and their book removal policies for each of the school boards. How do you explain to people what records are public and which ones are under sunshine laws?
BF: That's a big question because in North Carolina, like a lot of states, we have a pretty broad law that says that public records of government activity are the property of the people. And then there's a lot of exemptions and exceptions to that law.
First of all, citizens are entitled to everything that journalists are entitled to, and vice versa, they're not treated any differently.
But what journalists do is they act as that proxy for the public because while a lot of us are at our nine-to-five jobs doing the work that we're hired to do, journalists are hired to be your watchdog in the fight for open records and open information. And they use the skills that they acquire on the job and in their education to go and pour over government data to get answers to big public policy questions, to try to better understand government activity so that they can bring you useful, actionable information.
So the way that I describe what's available to you is - all sorts of things are available to you, but what journalists do is they help make sense of it, and they help put that information into action for you so that you can understand policy choices that elected and appointed leaders are making so that you can better hold those leaders accountable for the decisions that they make.
We're very much in this partnership together between citizens and journalists doing work that benefits all of us. And a great example of that is the Sunshine Week collaborative project, where you see newsrooms from all over the state, really from Murphy to Manteo - mountains to ocean - working together on an issue that is all over the news about how groups are asking for books to be pulled out of public school libraries and trying to understand what government responses to those requests. The project is really about how the government is handling those requests and how the government is handling the policy choices behind that by using our sunshine laws to gain a little bit of a better understanding of the activity in that space.
