New FCC online political ad disclosure rule exposes dark money TV buys

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.