Kathy Kiely

Americans get a new tool for approximating the size of what you might call the nation's "Gross Political Product." Beginning soon, every broadcast television station in the country will have to post online 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 ability to take a close and more accurate read of spending on (mostly negative) political TV ads -- already north of $40 million in April when the Wesleyan Media project released a study on the 2014 Senate contests -- represents a rare victory for transparency in a political system increasingly inundated with dark money.

It's also a huge expansion of a pilot project launched in 2012, when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ordered affiliates of the top broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC) in the nation's 50 largest TV markets to begin online posting of their political ad files. That's why the Sunlight Foundation and other organizations, including Free Press and ProPublica, began an effort to systematically track TV ad buys during the 2012 campaign.

An example is Americans for Prosperity (AFP), which has not reported a single TV ad buy during the 2014 cycle to the FEC, even though Sunlight's ad tracking tools show that the group has been extremely active in swing states, especially North Carolina and Michigan. Plenty of Democratic-allied groups, such as Patriot Majority and the League of Conservation Voters, engage in the same kind of under-the-FEC-radar advertising.

[Commentary] The Federal Communications Commission just made the cost of a Senate seat a lot easier to calculate. The FCC quietly signaled that -- opposition from the National Association of Broadcasters notwithstanding -- all broadcast TV stations must begin posting political ad buys online as of July 1.

That's a big deal. It means the FCC faced down a well-funded and influential constituency. And it means voters in six states with heated Senate races, but no top-tier TV market, now will be able to find out just who is paying for all the political ads clogging their airwaves and just how much they are spending. Until the FCC's 2012 order, the only way the public could access broadcast filings was by riding circuit to local TV stations and rooting through paper files.

Why is this important? Some of the biggest money in politics today is being spent completely off the Federal Election Commission's radar screen. Television advertisements that mention or depict a candidate and clearly express a point of view about that candidate don't have to be reported to the nation's campaign finance watchdog unless the ads run within 30 days of a primary election or 60 days of a general election. That means a lot elected officials are piling up a lot of IOUs to deep-pocketed donors without the public being able to see -- which is why we're using TV ad files to make them visible.