As of this week, the Federal Communications Commission is requiring all television stations across the country to make their political ad files available on the Internet.
Beginning Tuesday this week, every broadcast television station in the country will have to post on-line copies of contracts and other information about the political advertisements they are airing. For the first time, voters will have easy access to documents detailing who is buying campaign commercials and how much money they are spending.
The expanded on-line access comes just in time. At least six of this year's most hotly contested Senate races , which will likely determine control of the closely-divided chamber , are taking place in states that don't have a top-50 television market: Alaska, Arkansas, Iowa, Louisiana, Montana and West Virginia. In addition, the public will now be getting online access to the political ad files of important stations that aren't affiliated with the big four broadcast networks, including Spanish-language stations.
This rule should make it a bit easier for Investigative Bloggers to track down who is really financing political advertising in television.
the planned system isn't going to be user friendly. Basically, each station will upload what's called in the PDF file of each buy. And you can see each time somebody has placed in order for the ads. But then you actually have to go into that document and sort of read.It's not really what you would call structured data that would allow us to do kind of easy analysis.
But it will help you find out who is really behind a group called for instance " American Dads for Guns " whether they are connected to the Dems or GOP in some way
link to FCC rule here : Modernizing Broadcast Television Public File Availability.
Here is another source article : Free Press Pleased That Court Denied Broadcasters' Attempt to Stall Political File Rules