Here’s some potentially good news. I wrote back in January about an FCC proposed rule that would force local TV stations to put the results of the political ad spending on their airwaves online, rather than in an obscure filing room at the station that few people ever see. This would increase the transparency of [...]

One of the biggest disasters with the broken campaign finance system is that we actually have no reporting mechanism for assessing how much money gets spent on campaigns, at least on television. Sometimes candidates and PACs will announce their spending on ads, but local stations are not obligated to publicly and fully report how much [...]

Jerry Brown put it best yesterday – “Meg Whitman isn’t just happy buying commercial breaks, now she’s trying to buy the newscasts, too.” In fact, Whitman is offering video news releases of her speeches, in an effort to manage all media appearances rather than face the press. Even in media-poor California, this is starting to [...]