Really great news, and good work by the Sunlight Foundation (which is a much better place for your contributions than NPR):
We’ve told them once. We’ve told them twice. The third time, we’re bringing lawyers.
The Sunlight Foundation and the Campaign Legal Center, represented by Georgetown University Law Center’sInstitute for Public Representation, are filing complaints Thursday with the Federal Communications Commission against 11 television stations for letting political advertisers flout federal disclosure requirements.
The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, passed with the support of both parties and signed into law in 2002 by then-President George W. Bush, requires individuals and organizations buying political commercials to provide certain basic identifying information for the TV station’s public file. All too often, that information — which can be key in helping voters make informed decisions at the ballot box — is being omitted.
We know this in large part because of two years of dogged work by the Sunlight Foundation’s Jacob Fenton, a reporter and developer who helped create Political Ad Sleuth, an online tool for crowdsourcing this critical information. Sunlight began work on this early in 2012 in partnership withFree Press to help identify the sources of money behind the political organizations — thinly disguised as nonprofits — that dumped at least $330 million into the 2012 campaign.
Political nonprofits, which often come with singularly uninformative names like “American Action Network” or “Patriot Majority USA,” are not required to disclose much of their spending — or any of their donors — to the FEC. But there is one place where they do have to leave a paper trail: the TV stations where they buy ads. That’s why we put our focus there.
Let’s all sit back and see how long it takes the FCC to rule on any of these complaints. It’s one thing to make rules and regulations and set up agencies to enforce them. It’s quite another to have those agencies actually take any action against violators. There were plenty of regulations in place in 2006 and Wall Street banks collapsed anyway.