Shining a Light on Campaign Ad Rates

Technically, the amount of money campaigns spend to run attack ads on TV is public information. By law, all broadcasters have to keep records of political ad buys, including their cost, and show them to anyone who asks. That doesn’t mean the data are easily accessible. You have to trek to TV stations during business hours, persuade a worker to fetch the records, and sometimes even produce exact change if you want to photocopy them.

“In a broadband world, that just doesn’t make any sense,” Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said last fall. The agency is weighing a regulation that would force broadcasting companies to report political-ad sales data on a centralized website the FCC would manage. Putting records online—broadcasters would have to upload an ad buy the same day they close the sale—could make it easier to trace spending by super-PACs and other outside groups, especially those that aren’t required to disclose their donors.