"... this ... provides some helpful information as to what group really is claiming that Joe Candidate is either a great guy or a nasty jerk."

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Political junkies, rejoice. It’s a big day in finding out more about who’s really behind all those TV ads.
By James Warren, July 1, 2014

Political junkies have a new tool to unravel secrets of a bedrock of the election system: who’s paying for all those TV ads.

As of Tuesday, every broadcast TV station has to post online copies of the contracts they cut with political advertisers.

Until today, only the FOX, CBS, NBC and ABC stations in the largest 50 TV markets had to do so.

That means you couldn’t go online to find out about the ads on, say, the Univision or Telemundo affiliates in New York City, one of the 50 largest markets. More telling, you couldn’t go online to find anything about any stations in Rochester, Buffalo or markets not in the top 50.

This is a victory for several activist groups, including the Sunlight Foundation, since many stations had resisted putting this information online.

It prompted litigation and, two years ago, the Federal Communications Commission won a court case, prompting the pilot project involving the big network stations in the top 50 markets.

Now that’s expanding. As Kathy Kiely of the Sunlight Foundation explained it to me Tuesday, as of Monday, you could go online to get information about ads broadcast on 230 stations. As of today, it’s up to around 2,000.

This is all the more timely since, as Kiely underscored, at least six hot U.S. Senate contests are in states without a TV market in the top 50, namely Alaska, Arkansas, Iowa, Louisiana, Montana and West Virginia.

It’s also important since, as she writes on her group’s own website, in some instances these posting “provide the only public information available on groups that are thinly disguised as nonprofit ‘social welfare’ organization but are, in fact, major campaign players. Their tax status, plus the way they word and time their political advertising, exempts them from having to disclose their spending on their backers to the FEC [Federal Election Commission], the agency created after the Watergate scandal to make campaign spending accountable.”

And since so many ads are backed by groups that don’t have to disclose the sources of their money, this at least provides some helpful information as to what group really is claiming that Joe Candidate is either a great guy or a nasty jerk

Two good places to go looking for information are Sunlight’s site  and the FCC’s site.

Sunlight’s Political Ad Sleuth site is: http://politicaladsleuth.com/.

The FCC site is:  https://stations.fcc.gov/.

One advantage of what Sunlight will do is that you need not search for just one individual station; you can search across a whole market, state or even the nation to see what a certain group is up to.

The actual totals being spent will be a bit tricky to quickly unravel, given how the contract information will be uploaded via a PDF. It’s why Sunlight has a volunteer crew in Philadelphia adding up all the information there. It will be quite labor intensive.

But this will surmount several obstacles in finding out what groups are actually behind ad buys. In addition, it will make it tougher for advertisers to avoid disclosing all relevant information mandated by federal regulations; something they’ve been able to do amid less-than-vigilant policing by individual stations.
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